3: Hammer of Thor Chronicles: Lost Blood
by La Aardvark
Summary: Deep in the farthest reaches of the stars, a beacon lies adrift, its wailing song all that remains of a once-proud vessel, and her legendary inhabitant... Six years after vanishing, sign of the missing SPARTAN appears at last.
1. Oh Darn

**1: OH DARN**

I have nothing against Longswords.

Honest.

But they all seem to have something against me. Mine – again – had broken down, though to be fair, this time it was hardly the machine in question at fault. Brutes or other sundry Covenant garbage aside, I was currently chasing what amounted to an Innie. He wasn't – not technically. But he was most definitely not working _with_ Humanity as a whole. His was a pirate ship, and he preyed on everyone. His most recent lucky swipe had landed him in the rat hole, however, as what he'd broken into and stolen from was nothing less than a sleek ONI sloop.

Wow, and I thought ONI was irritable before. How the man had even found the sloop was a very good question, although everyone was pretty sure he hadn't ever actually looked for the thing. Rather, when the sloop had come out of slipspace, his ship had come out pretty much on top of it, right out of the wrong end of a previous raid. Their collective slipspace ruptures had sung to each other for a full minute before closing up, but the resulting eruption so near to one another caused their mass-fed gravity signatures to magnetize.

Or something. It was a rather technical string of words.

The short and nasty was, the two ships collided. Being the lighter and smaller of the two, the ONI sloop came out at the worst end of the deal, and being the pirate he was, the captain of the other ship had to make a grab or risk his reputation. What he'd taken was a report that hadn't even been filed back at ONI HQ yet, so not even the spooks who wanted it back knew what it was. And for ONI, that was really going some.

I entered the scene around about the time when the pirate in question appeared to be heading outsystem about as fast as any mortal being could fly… and I personally had a hunch it was because of something on that report he'd filched. The same gut that told me that much also insisted that whatever it was, it wasn't what he thought it was, and it was very bad. So when I received orders to fill in for the insanely busy Grey Team on this one, I got a sense of urgency the spook actually failed to instill.

Maybe his guts aren't as circumstance-savvy as mine. Either way, I rather betted that his weren't twisting in freefall either. I was not really a bad pilot. In fact, I had graduated the class with fairly high marks. I had a fairly decent gee-force tolerance, for one thing. Riding a curve at mach seven gave me visual distortions, but little else. However, in my defense, this did not necessarily make me the greatest tracker or hunter in the world, and as a result, I was once again stuck in the middle of practically nowhere.

That's layman's terms for "out of signal range". I'd need to drop a slipspace beacon to get any kind of attention, where I was. My bird hung lifeless at the behest of a hidden mine my instruments hadn't been able to detect, but even though my momentum had not been harmed much, my direction had. So now I was flying pretty much at sublight eight on a fifteen-degree curveball out away from the colonies.

Which is layman's terms for "up shit creek". I had been sitting pretty rolling my helmet between my knees and waiting for something interesting to happen for nearly two hours, but even as much as I really and truly wanted to, I couldn't let myself use the excuse to catch up on much-needed sleep.

I had carefully not told the medical staff while back in their clutches, but the honest truth was I was not doing well. Something had hit my hidden hair trigger, possibly way back when, and after a lifetime shooting up aliens often too bullet-butchered to tell the species of afterwards, I had begun to need more inclination than mere boredom to want to nod off.

The nightmares were waking me up, now. And it was getting worse.

Speaking of the medical staff… the reconstruction of my bad shoulder hadn't helped much. It was still weak, though they had surgically closed and more or less smoothed over the old piercing. Now it was a large swath of scar tissue that burned whenever I got it wet.

Finally, the haunting quiet got to me, and I pushed off the main bulkheads to find somewhere to curl up. I was willing enough to get some rest – sleep I could do without, but rest I could manage. Thing was, though your typical Longsword was roomier than a simple cockpit, it did not exactly have a suite with a bed or even a cot. There was the cockpit, the forward drop, the rear engine access, and a stretch of corridor down both sides of the back where a fellow might lie down if he wanted to; but he'd block that hall completely in doing so.

Being alone, I had no fear of being stepped on, although the utter lack of gravity at current within my ship posed a significant problem towards any action involving the word "down". I was just about to call it quits and just let myself hang there in midair when I heard the rumbling start.

It wasn't really an audio sound, but rather one of those noises you feel. The vibrations shook the air, the bulkheads, the very bones of the metal craft I was in, and I could feel the tingle on my skin even beneath my refitted and restored Mjolnir suit. My senses came back online, revived out of boredom, and I shoved my head back into the helmet before swatting at the walls to return to the cockpit.

I got about three feet and then crashed spectacularly – and heavily – to the floor.

"Ugh!" I got my arms underneath me, and shook the stars out of my head before picking myself the rest of the way up. Barely was I on my feet when I heard the decompressive hiss of the rear hatch pulling open. There was also that signature scream of metal stressing and stretching before utterly pulling apart. Whoever was opening my back door, they weren't using a key… nor even the hinges. Shrugging, I abandoned the cockpit destination in favor of moving down the corridor to the engine access, which was directly opposite the hatch, and bumping my fist against the single weapons locker the craft owned.

The door depressed, hissed, then extended outward, and the spring-hinged arms holding the SMG and the MA6B opposite one another popped out. I lifted the rifle free, it traded hands, and the SMG was dropped into the latchkey on my armored thigh.

Dropping the rifle into my hands in a ready-to-use position, I then walked the last couple of feet around the corner of the engine access to meet the opened hatch. I quickly found my one little MA6B rather outgunned when I came into the sightline of my… should I call them rescuers?

Nine t-25 DERs were all pointed back at me, four of the splitlips holding two and one holding one with what looked like some kind of engine tool in his other hand. Still – even minus the wrench, I was outgunned for the moment, and I dropped my aim.

"Hello, boys."

The greeting made them exchange glances – confusion rippled across their features, before one of the dual-wielders dipped his aim, too. He was alone in the motion, however, much to my disappointment. "You claim to know us, Human?"

"Not so much." I admitted, stepping fully out into the hatchway. It might be foolhardy of me considering my reception so far, but it at least would prove that I wasn't joking around with them about it. I ran my tired eyes over their faces, trying to pick one of them out as something familiar. None of them clicked. I sighed. "So who should I expect this time… Anuna?"

The name, and quite possibly the way I so casually tossed it out there in expectation, made them squirm and exchange more glances. It did not, sadly, lower those last seven guns. Not even an inch.

I stood there waiting for at least a denial – I would not have protested a denial – without getting so much as a peep out of any of the five of them, before finally shaking my head and turning halfway to return to the Longsword's interior.

"Stop, Human!" One of them commanded.

Okay. I stopped.

"Come out of that Human fighter vessel. Do it slowly."

Now that… that part served to annoy. Trying not to show it, I turned back around, and tromped about as heavily as I could down the broken hatch to the floor of the bay in front of them. I was back in one of those nondescript, hopelessly purple ship bays one finds in generic Covenant and former-Covenant craft. "Who's running the ship?" I asked, hoping for a familiar name. I hadn't really gotten to know all that many Elites during the fighting on Delta Halo, but right about then I found myself wishing that I had. It would have put me in a bit of a better position about now. But then, that _had_ been nigh going on six years ago.

And the shoulder had yet to fully recover.

"Shipmaster Sasaak 'Vahatimee."

Never heard of him. Aloud, I grunted. "He know anyone I know, by any chance?"

The tool-holder clicked at me. That meant he was either annoyed or feeling impatient with my… shall we say… Humanness. "Name them, and he might."

"Anuna?" I honestly did not know the kid's other name.

Heads shook.

"G'wi?" I think I knew his other name once, but hell, that was six years ago! And I doubted I had really paid attention to it even at the time. He was, and had always been, just G'wi. Strange, crazy, sort of mutated, and a lot weird, even for an Elite. But he'd always just been G'wi.

"G'wi who?" The one not pointing his guns at me prompted, fueling hope. I tried to make it die early, feeling fairly certain that he was just playing with me. Surely G'wi wasn't the Elite version of John. The gods knew there were a whole lot of Humans named that.

My John not the least among them…

"I don't know. He used to be an Honor Guard." I admitted.

"That is now considered a standing of shame, Human, it is not lightly admitted in these dark days. Warriors great and small strive to prove first to themselves that they are still worthy of their honor… even before we prove it to our people."

Gah. I rolled my eyes.

"You still hold that arm strangely, old friend."

The voice turned me bodily around, and sent blood to my face in indignation that he'd snuck up on me. He was clad in black, now, and not yellow, with far smaller pauldrons and without the cape or massive headdress. It made him look smaller… more trim. But the marks across his face were unmistakable. And there seemed a mockery of the word "sin" etched into the left side in English, too. Though… I don't remember that. It was really just a massive tangle of crisscrossed lines, happening to intersect at some of the right points to create the effect.

"Does the old wound still pain you?"

I waited for it… nope. Waited some more… nope. Huh. Apparently he'd either gotten his voicebox fixed or had learned to actually talk right during my absence. But either way, he was speaking with the same manner and inflection as everyone else was. In a way, I was saddened by the development – it had made him unique.

He cocked his long head up on one side, his expression lifting slightly in indication I was expected to speak. I coughed. "Hi."

"Did the young ones bother you terribly?" G'wi asked, waving their guns down past me.

"You look like you've been run through a meat grinder and then reassembled." I blurted.

He gave a soft laugh. "Ah, Flint, my good friend… do not patronize me. You can answer whatever query I might conjure to ask, and you might do so without prejudice." He spread his hands, extending upwards also slightly with the gesture. "I do not work for your people in any sense of the term, and military facts are best shared between us, are they not? We fight the same enemies… Brutes, and Flood. San Shayuun not the least among that mention, of course."

The last on his list made the five kids behind me murmur some rather interesting profanities under their breaths. I suspected it was a rather common thing – someone mentioned the Prophets, and everyone else got temporary permission to spit something colorful with respect for the mention. I almost laughed.

G'wi inhaled, long and slow, then crossed his arms over his armored chest and exhaled as if in another one of his expressive methods of trying to prompt me. I wasn't sure how to perform, though. "I'm working." I offered.

"On a broken Human ship?" He ran his eyes over the thing, noting the utter lack of a left wing, and all the ugly scoring in the metal where said wing met the body. I offered the damage a tentative look of my own, feeling a little awed. I hadn't realized I was missing an entire wing…

"Apparently so." I mumbled, staring at the damage.

"Flint, Flint, Flint." He shook his head slowly, back and forth, like an old sage afraid to rattle his brains too harshly. "You should learn to stay out of those things. One of these days one of them will kill you… and then whom shall I torment, when I have nothing else to do?"

I tore my gaze from the broken ship to stare at the Elite. "So it is deliberate."

He gave a half-nod, half-bow type motion. "Of course." He was quite obviously amused. "It seems I am not the only warrior to find you in your oddly repetitious dire moment of need… I received word from 'Taramee of the incident prior." He recrossed his arms, apparently using the gesture more to rest his arms than to express anything with. "Will no warrior who meets you ever do so while you stand in good health, Flint?"

I pondered that. "I'm working on it."

He uncrossed them again. Boy! He fidgets more than I do. "Work a little harder, Flint, your lack of enthusiasm for your desired end result is showing. Glaringly." Then he waved for me to follow, and turned away.

I cast a glance back at the five stooges who had greeted me, shrugged, and strode off after G'wi. If I didn't know any better, he might have well aged a hundred years or more just in the last six since I'd seen him last. But he was at least not pointing a weapon at me, and the worst he apparently had planned for me was a talk to catch up on lost time.

While never truly friends with the fellow, I had to admit it was not unsavory to find him again under the circumstances. However… I was not particularly interested in catching up with the guy. Elites were… strange. After the utterly traumatizing run with 'Taramee roughly six months before, I was hardly in the mood for more of the same.

Silently I swore to myself if G'wi offered to have me visit his new baby I'd run screaming the other way. He took me up an auxiliary corridor that I understood the connections of simply from memory of the layout of 'Taramee's ship, then made a juncture through the ramp-work over the secondary coolant feeds. I felt odd, knowing what was under the flooring beneath my boots. More so, that no matter where G'wi took me, I'd always know where it was ahead of time.

Being bored and utterly unwilling to nap while trapped on the _Unhindered Immolation_ had led me to explore the thing so many times over that I'd gotten to know the ship almost as well as her Captain… er… Shipmaster. I guessed I would never get lost on another Covenant cruiser ever again.

G'wi looked as if he were examining me, though he never seemed to actually make any decisions about whatever he thought he was seeing. Finally, bored of holding the thing, I threw the MA6B over my shoulder, dropping it into the catches on the battery pack of my armor. The telling clack of engagement let me know the rifle wouldn't hit the floor. I let my arms drop back to my sides.

"What is it about you, I wonder," he began, finally, breaking the silence, "that makes your leaders send you out alone to work?" He tilted his head at me, seeming to look at me with just one of his eyes. I looked back. "You never seem to get them accomplished without some form of aid… so why alone? Why not with some of your Marines?"

I didn't have to think about that answer. "Spartans have always worked alone… ever since the first Halo."

"You were alone when I found you the first time, Flint." He reminded.

"Not at first." I pondered the meaning of this seeming innocuous conversation we were having. What was he really after? Why had the Elites begun to make a habit of coming and picking me up every time I ran into a hitch mid-mission? I had a rather nasty suspicion that whatever I was doing would again be put on hold – or at least modified slightly – in order to fit around whatever other need the Elites had of me.

G'wi sounded unconvinced. "You've an impressive lucky streak."

I scoffed openly at him. "I would not call a ruinous track record _lucky_. I've hit every stump and hitch and hangup known to Man."

"And yet… you are still here." He folded his arms across his chest again, lending to the budding belief that he did it like a nervous tick or unconscious habit. I wondered if it really had some underlying meaning. Did he do it to conceal some old injury in one of his own shoulders? Did he have something he wanted to cover? Or was he just having difficulty expressing what he wanted to express, given that I was Human and he wasn't? I knew enough about Elites to know that asking would get me nowhere. In a sense, I knew enough about Elites to know that learning anything more about them was going to take pulled hen's teeth to accomplish.

Shy of dying horribly and reincarnating as one of them, that was. I had to admit, though… that particular event was not on my to-do list.

"It has recently come to my attention that a certain Human vessel – a small freighter refitted with a weapons system and shielding – has breached the unspoken barrier between your people's territory and mine."

So that's what this was about. He wanted to bitch to me about how my target was out of bounds. He was in luck, though, given as that ship was hardly in my favor. "I know."

"And is this what you were doing?"

'Doing' could have been construed in any number of ways. I had to take that query with a grain of salt the size of my head. "Yes." If I said more than just, he'd probably riddle me with accusations.

"What is its mission?" He sounded fatally serious; he wanted me to tell him it was an ONI vessel, and that what it was doing was of utmost importance, and that interference in its mission would cause galactic catastrophe. If I said anything less, he seemed of a wont to hunt it down and smash it to bits.

Behind my concealing golden mask, I grinned a death's-head grin. Yes, oh yes. Here we most definitely went again. "You may destroy it if you wish."

That threw him. His step faltered, and he shot me a look of offset confusion. "You are serious?"

I gave a single nod. "But before you do, I want opportunity to go aboard, and reclaim the data center."

"That is all? No request for amnesty of the Humans crewing it?" He sounded honestly astonished. We Humans had a reputation, I suppose, for preserving each other at all costs. But this was a little different. I was supposed to kill the pirates anyway… letting the Elites do it for me wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings, although if information was left out at the wrong political level, it would look mighty awkward.

I shook my head, and by the motion felt the throat seal brush my chin. Oh! I had never sealed my helmet down. That explained a few minor things, like why I could still feel the hot inboard air on my throat. I doubted anyone on the outside could tell it was open, though. All I'd done was drop the helmet over my head, back in the Longsword. If I wasn't dead yet, I didn't figure it meant much.

Still, I did pretend to fumble with one of the latches, to make sure it wasn't going to slouch on me. Maybe later I'd actually seal it down. If I remembered to.

"You are certain your superiors would condone such permission?" He was still probing me, though, apparently unconcerned about my poking myself in the throat.

"Those are my orders." I admitted, finally. "Find the ship, eliminate those onboard, secure the data center and scuttle the boat once I'm off. Then I return to HQ."

G'wi marveled at that for a moment, before nodding. "I shall relay this information at once. It has its aim lain squarely on forbidden territory – a quarantine zone."

"Really?" Now it was my turn to be a little off my balance. "Why is it quarantined?"

"It is a Forerunner research installation, Flint. Any ships going in are at great risk of contamination, and I need not say what with. Those same ships would then be going out loaded with infection, and it would spread out of the quarantine zone."

His words resonated an ill feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was nothing quite so persistent, quite so unwilling to let it drop, as the Flood. And that moronic pirate was diving straight into an open nest! What exactly was on that ONI report, anyway, that he'd feel brave enough to do that? Did he not know it was Flood, by some chance, or did he think the risk worth the profit of a few filched gizmos? Regardless, the level of urgency I had felt upon being handed the mission had just quadrupled. Not only was there ONI intelligence at risk of loss, there was a Flood containment area at risk of being breached.

The last thing I needed was for Flood to have a ship in possession. It was the last thing _anyone_ needed. "How fast can this thing go?"

"There are other ships between it and its destination who can cripple its engines. We will take you to it to make the extraction, since you have been honest with me, but we reserve the right to its destruction." G'wi told me.

"I have no problem with letting you get in a little target practice." I suppose it might not work out so badly after all. Not if they had been tracking the intruder for a while and were already poised to erase it at the word that it was not on a mission to save the galaxy. Anything of less importance, I guess, would elicit the same reaction. Destruction.

I didn't mind that part, though. But coming home without that intel packet would get me hurt in an interesting way. Now, though, I knew the extent of the 'need to know only' part of the mission. I made a mental note to tell the spooks at ONI to word their reports differently from now on. Obviously, their pretend-code ways had very thoroughly shot them in their collective foot.

"You can tell me what you've been up to these past years." G'wi mentioned.

I smiled. "No, I can't." He knew that. Maybe he was poking fun, in his alien way. Maybe he wasn't. But either way, I had decided that maybe it wasn't so bad after all, to be back in the presence of an old friend.

For the first time, the clamor of old battles in the back of my mind lay silent… a cumulative breath before the storm. I appreciated the stall, but I knew without being told that it would only return. Someday, that mess was going to drive me insane, and then the UNSC would move my name to the list with my brothers and sisters, under the oblique heading of MIA.

And everyone who saw it would know it wasn't the truth. Spartans who were MIA never came home. I was the only exception to that rule, having been publicly executed once, and then somehow managed to live to tell about it afterwards. I had long ago let go of the idea I would ever see John again – my old troop leader had a special place in my heart, as he had for all of us, but we had all thought he'd outlast all of us.

For the moment… that man had turned out to be me.

I felt guilty about stealing that title from him. If anyone deserved to go home one last time, to see the grizzled, grandfatherly face of old Lord Hood during one more medallion ceremony, it was definitely John.

And instead, it had been me.

Maybe Cortana had finally met the end of her projected lifespan, and had gone rampant, leaving John without his striking edge. He was good without her – we all were. But he was better with her, good enough to run a gauntlet across Alpha Halo all by himself to approach the end with barely a few bruises to show for it.

Me? I'd come away from my first Halo barely alive, and most definitely not in one piece. My bum shoulder was testament to that. I would never be able to flip a 'hog or a scorpion with that arm ever again. I would never be able to wrestle an Elite to the floor, never get the best of a bunch of Grunts, never come off the high end of a Halcyon-class frigate in a swan dive and be able to walk away from it.

The truth was, despite my shiny exterior, I was hardly a SPARTAN anymore… my augmentations and my Mjolnir had kept me alive, but they had not spared me the damage report. I was junk… used up and a ragged inch from washing out. Thing was, being as I was the only Spartan the UNSC had to parade before the people anymore, I couldn't take any rest.

Grey Team didn't hardly spend any time at all at home… their faces were not known, their Mjolnir masks not the symbol of planetary valor and hope. No one had seen them. Only ONI and myself, really, knew they were even out there. Truth be told they were not exactly personable to large crowds, either. Trying to get footage of them in action, or even to get them in any kind of capacity to show to the public without jeopardizing some mission or other would be difficult at best.

So again… that left me.

Not that Grey Team was comprised of real Spartans. They were the next generation… they just wore the old armor because most of the SPI outfits had been trashed in combat, too. Mjolnir could take more of a beating before it crumbled, and being out in deep space for very easily years at a time between coming in, Grey Team would need every inch of extra coverage they could get.

I didn't feel alone, not so much. But I did feel like the cripple I was. I could still walk, but that was about as far as I got. Maybe I was one of the ones the augmentations didn't take right in, but they had gotten enough of a good reaction initially that none of the scientists had noticed. It might explain some of the horrifying memories I had of lying awake through that process.

I remember I'd practically had sedative for blood when they began, but it still didn't do anything to me. I was the only Spartan to walk out to the field for my first op who went there with existing mental scarring. I took bullets, fists, collapsing ship structure, even mortar rounds without complaint because of that. I was always comparing the new inflictions to the value of that old one, and even being strung up in front of a crowd of millions of jeering aliens hadn't topped it.

Nothing had.

G'wi showed me to a quarter where I could stay, then turned me loose to either stay in it or get lost wandering. He didn't know – and I didn't tell him – that there was no way I could ever get lost by wandering. I knew the blueprints of the ship already.

I let him wander off, though, feeling tired enough finally to make myself sit down. It felt good, but once the pressure was off, I began to feel the ache bubble up through the relief. Lifting my helmet off, I set it beside me on the low cot set into the wall I'd sat down on. The quarter was small, smaller than the one 'Taramee had granted me, but I suspected it was because it was a cubby against the hull that had not been big enough for much else. In fact, from what I was able to tell about the architecture of the ship I was in, this was more or less the only quarter on the ship too small to bunk more than one Elite inside it.

There were command crew quarters big enough to bunk several, I knew, but not a single one of those did. I was in the proverbial broom closet, so to speak. I wasn't going to complain; it left me isolated from anyone who might report what they saw if they caught me dozing. I had never seen it – never nodded off in front of a camera to know – but I was pretty sure it wasn't pretty. Just by the way my insides always felt each time I came awake high on adrenaline with my heart in my head and my veins on fire. Sometimes, I'd come off whatever I'd dozed off on so fast I knocked it over or back or down.

Once, a Marine had told me he thought I'd sat dead still for too long, and when he came over to slap my shoulder, I'd damn near killed him with my awakening. I do remember finding myself suddenly back in reality, with a strangling man in my grip, but I don't recall how I got that way. I felt rather fortunate in that he chose not to hold it against me at all, though how he'd gotten so unlucky right then had been volunteered. I didn't ask.

That was the only time I'd been left dormant for long enough behind friendly lines for that to happen, though. I didn't run from sleep for image's sake. I ran from it because being down there in the deep recesses of my own brain was beginning to become too frightening for even myself to want to go there.

As I sat on the recessed bunk in the little quarter, my helmet my only companion in the gathering violet gloom, I wondered if I would find peace when I died. Would it end, would I be able to sleep at last without nightmares? Or would I roam the solar winds of the galaxy, a lost and tormented soul, glimpsed by only the least fortunate soldiers and warriors in battles the universe over? I had never seen a ghost… or at least I didn't think I ever had.

I knew my lack of occupying activity was making my eyelids heavy, but as much as I did not want to doze off, my weary carcass was less inclined to lift me up and carry me off to find something to do to occupy my mind than I liked. I wondered if I'd reached the end, and needed to do something besides work before I could venture on. Was this what 'dead on your feet' was like?

What the hell.

I forced myself off the bunk for one final commitment, sparing a minute and five to strip out of the Mjolnir. If that door locked I had no idea. How to make it lock I knew even less. But at the moment, I didn't care. I pulled all of it off, figuring if I needed anything, I could go back down to the bay and get it out of my Longsword. But spending some quality time on the closest thing to a real bed within lightyears of my position wouldn't harm anything.

I folded the combat skin the way I'd been taught, setting the neat square of stiff polymer fabric next to the standing segments of my armor. It came apart, like any good armor suit should, but it was by no means as partial as it appeared when on the wearer. I turned away from the assembly, spilling out across the bunk on my back, and that's where the world stopped.

* * *

I could feel the mathematically perfect flatness of the surface beneath me, but oddly there was little else there. Inside my armor, the atmosphere was a carefully machine-regulated mix, but it still wasn't getting me air any better. I gasped, wheezed, coughed, all to no effect. My body begged for oxygenation, begged for air. But the harder I inhaled, the less I seemed to draw in. My skin prickled each time I moved, each tiny flex sending racing ripples of worrisome sensation across my exterior.

I couldn't see. Nowhere I turned my eyes earned me visual input. No matter how hard I squeezed them shut, though, the blinding, searing torment would not leave them. In that moment, within my agonizing sensory deprivation, I realized two things.

I was trapped in a place very small… barely bigger in dimensions than I was.

And I couldn't hear that one sound that I had never been able to shut out. As hard as I was fighting for a breath, a gasp of air, as much effort as I was putting into that inward concentration, as much punishing as I was giving my surroundings, and with all the utter lack of outward sound to be had, there was nothing at all to explain why I couldn't hear my heartbeat.

My arms felt sluggish, heavy. My chest felt like a solid brick. But my head wanted to explode like fused atoms caught within an accelerator. I fought it, but finally, my body fell limp, unable to respond to my command or unwilling I was unsure. Then, in the gathering dark, I was only a thought from oblivion.

_What is happening to me?_ I wondered.

I watched as light blossomed above me, both dim and weak, but growing steadily in size and brightness. Finally, it became enough for me to recognize the rolling frost over my prone form, and the source behind the light that had appeared so far away just a moment ago.

Around it was curled the hand of an Elite, his face masked behind a scout helmet, the convex visor plates over each eye shining a deep, light-sucking black against his more moderate armor.

I blinked. The action cleared a slight amount of the fog, allowing me to realize the glow the Elite held was a brightly burning energy blade. The warrior stood there in full battle dress, grenades on his belt and a plasma rifle at his hip, the barrel of a Carbine standing out like a flag pole over his hunched shoulder. The longer he stood there, the more damaged he became, until long scoring and deep gouges marked his once blemishless armor, turning it from what had been an attractive blue to a scorched, horrid black. Soot and blood stained through from the underside of the paint, what remained of it, and seeped down into the gouges, scoring and scratches. Granules of dirt rose from the mess like erupting pimples. Cracks formed, crawling slowly across the armor, until at last, the blast glass fractured and fell from the socket of the visor on the left.

The glass sprinkled across my face, telling me I was not, after all, wearing my helmet. I couldn't do anything except blink, so there was no way to know if the rest of the Mjolnir was gone too.

As I watched, the now raggedly beaten Elite reached up, his empty hand shaking as for pain of injury, and lifted his concealing helmet from his face. Beneath the broken helmet, he proved a war-weary warrior indeed. Blood spiderwove across his face over obvious lacerations and bruising, and the use of the eye behind the broken visor plate was lost.

But I found I knew who I was looking at anyway. _G'wi! What happened to you?_ My tongue felt like a dead weight. At some point I didn't recall, I had stopped gagging for air, and now I lay absolutely still.

I watched as G'wi blinked the one eye he had left, and as he raked the underside of his broken mandibles across the arm of the hand holding his helmet. "I am sorry, old friend." He said, sounding genuinely remorseful. "We could not hold them. We could not push them, and we have been driven back at every front. I come to you now in admittance of something I never thought I would ever say."

He hung his head for a moment, and a droplet of his blood fell from his forehead. I felt it splash beside my bare head, the sound of the tiny amount of liquid hitting like a mortar exploding under me.

"We have lost." G'wi concluded, finally, lifting his head enough to meet my gaze again. He looked farther up, then, over me at something past me that I couldn't see. "We have lost, and we are fewer with every passing moment. Soon they will come to this place, too, and they will burn it to the foundations, as they have done so many times before."

A burning thought presented itself. Who was they?

I couldn't speak it, and G'wi didn't hear my thought. He continued uninterrupted. "It is a sad day, old friend. A sad day indeed, to know that after all this time, it will end in this manner."

Who was they?

He shook his battered head, tucking his mandibles inward slightly with a gravelly sucking noise not unlike a sniffle made with the throat. Again, he wiped his mandibles across that same arm. Something dark and suspicious drooled across the armor, dripping away even before he could lower his arm again. Was he coughing up blood, so badly injured was he? I couldn't ask. I couldn't even move. I wished fervently that my body was operational.

"There is nothing we can do, Flint."

G'wi was the only Elite that knew, who still called me that. Everyone else called me by my honorary Elite name, 'Zelisee. Stubborn to his own ways, and very much like himself, G'wi alone called me Flint. I had often wondered why that was.

"There is nothing anyone can do, now. No time to try." He closed his good eye, and tried to breathe a sigh, but his breath caught and he hiccupped instead, before coughing out once before completing his exhalation. Inhaling a new breath, he concluded, "I know you never meant it to happen this way, Flint. But you fought the hardest to stop this, and in your valor and honor even you could not hold them back… and you of all of us were the first one to die."

Shock rocked my addled brains. First one to die! Fighting what? Why? Why was G'wi telling me this? As much as I tried, I still couldn't make any part of me move. I couldn't protest, I couldn't speak, or move. Didn't he know I was looking right at him? Couldn't he see my eyes were open? That on occasion, while bereft of all other motor function, I would blink? I wanted badly to scream in frustration. That, too, proved impossible.

G'wi inhaled slowly, the expression easily read. He was warming up to something he didn't like, but knew needed to be done. I found I didn't like the way it looked from my angle very soon after, when he raised the hand holding the glowing sword.

Don't… don't do that… no…. don't… _don't_…!

But he brought it down across me, finally re-igniting my nervous system, my motor function, and everything else. I came flying off the surface on which I lay like I had rockets strapped to my back, the cry erupting from my parched throat striking the stagnant air around me and echoing back beneath the original sound.

I blinked at the sudden rush of sensory information, tasting my lip and finding sweat. Violet walls as quiet and stable as metal sheathing could be adorned the barren room, the armor sitting in the corner just the way I'd left it.

_Wham, wham, wham, wham_

First, I touched my chest, checking for sword cuts. Finding none, I ran that hand over my head, and exhaled. It was still dark, still quiet. Nothing had changed – nary a dust mote had stirred, and no one was in the room with me. I was alone. Closing my eyes, I dug my knuckles into them, trying to squeeze the images out. It never worked, but the pain of pressure on my eyes always helped to wake me up.

But I knew I was already awake. I was awake, and I'd woken without outside prompting. Again. All my old aches remained, all the old weariness remained. I felt no better for having tried, though my eyelids did feel slightly less heavy.

Absently, as I pulled back into the combat skin, I wondered how long that one had taken. An hour? Less? I never really slept for long. The dreams saw to that. But when I pulled the last of my armor on over the combat skin and secured it down, sealing it in place, I watched my HUD flicker in indignant defiance.

I wasn't going to be knowing what time it was any time soon.

Grumbling, I smacked the wall beside the door with my fist on my way out, allowing the feel of the impact to follow me down the corridor as I made my way along. I was in a particularly irritable mood right then, and needing to tune up my armor's OS did not appeal to me. But it had to be done. The machinery was pretty modern, but it was not without bugs. And while to be fair to the stuff, this was only the second time it had happened, it was still damned annoying when it did.

I just needed a few minutes with the equipment I'd packed on the Longsword, then all would be right again for until the next time. If now was any kind of average to go by, that would happen some eight or ten weeks from now.

I was prepared to be satisfied with that… but if I ever figured out how to unplug the stupid upgrade making it glitch like it was, I'd just yank that, and then never need to deal with it ever again. I could handle being scolded by the techs back at ONI HQ better than I could deal with this sort of thing.

My Mjolnir was my skin, my bones, my lifeblood. If my armor crapped out on me, the event would kill me. Not directly – but then hardly anything was ever direct. I made it to the bay, got across it, and up inside the Longsword without seeing anybody. The one time I peeked out, all I saw was one of those floaty pink things with the trailing tentacles at the far end of the bay. It eventually left, though, without ever coming near me or my bird.

I was about as engrossed in my OS task as one could get, then, when my visitor finally turned up. His arrival about spooked me out of my own body, sending the majority of my equipment and all the connector cables in all directions… mostly to the floor.

I stood there staring at him, feeling torn. Should I grumble at him, or fret that I was losing my edge?

G'wi put up his hands in penance, offering apology wordlessly. The expression on his face told me he was just as alarmed by my reaction as I was – though for different reasons. He might guess correctly that I was pretty high-strung, but he'd never really figure out why until he'd had more time to observe my current condition. "I apologize… it was not my intent to startle you."

I exhaled, and sat down again, turning away from him to gather up the dumped equipment. I'd had to take my helmet off for this, but that was all. I imagined I looked rather bad… not that someone like G'wi would really be able to tell, given that the few times he'd actually seen my face, I'd been less than optimal. Now was little different.

He put his hands down, watching for a moment as I reassembled what I'd been doing. Finally, he asked, "Something is troubling you?"

Resting a hand atop the mass of tangled components and links in my lap, I sighed. "Something always is." I wished he'd drop it, but I knew better than to think that wish would be granted.

He found the copilot's seat, and sat down on the side of it, folding his arms across his knees as he watched me resume my task. Once I got it all untangled from itself, I put it all back the way I'd had it, and got back to the tuning. The last time I'd done this, I had gotten it right almost immediately. Now, though, I was having trouble focusing, and it was eating at my concentration. I couldn't seem to align the numbers right for some reason.

"May I know what it is, this time?" G'wi prompted.

I raised my head, and looked at him, feeling rumpled. I frowned for a moment, trying to come up with a convincing reason why it was none of his business. Honestly, though… the truth was he had every right to ask. Having a Spartan lose it on his ship would not be good for either myself or the crew, as the end result of that event might not be nearly as pretty as anyone might imagine as ideal. I just didn't want to talk about it.

I wasn't really much of one for telling stories anyway… never had been.

His mandibles flexed slightly, indicating he was quite aware of my internal dilemma. He couldn't possibly understand the depth of it, though. This was deeper than even I could quite grasp. What had me concerned was that I couldn't even put my finger on why. It was just something that happened, randomly, gradually, worsening over the years until it had finally become unbearable. When it became evident I wasn't going to answer him, in any fashion other than my look, he spoke again.

"I met a different Human once."

I cocked one brow.

"He was not unlike yourself. Shorter, to be sure. Wore a lesser kind of armor." He sat straight, and crossed his arms. The last I rather expected him to do, though, and paid the gesture no mind. "When he became at last convinced that I was no danger to him or his men, he and I spent several hours in converse." He offered a slight shrug motion. "He told me many things about your people."

I sniffed.

"He had eyes so blue they looked artificial." G'wi said. "And his skin was almost as pale as yours. He had seen enough sun to counter whatever potential for whiteness he might have, though."

"Your point?" I injected, finally, impatient for him to get it overwith. One thing about G'wi that had always annoyed me in the past was his tendency to bait a body, then make them beg on their knees before he'd tell them what he really had to say. I was not in the mood.

"He told me that Spartans were the icon of your people. Said you were the best of their very best. Said to me a thing I found most… interesting." He uncrossed his arms. "He told me Spartans never die."

Okay, that part I did find slightly amusing – for about a tenth of a second. I quirked up one corner of my mouth at him, a half-smirk at best, then turned away again, and returned to my task without comment.

"You disagree."

I didn't answer.

G'wi sighed at me. "Flint… you are not yourself." He insisted. "You have changed… and some of that I can understand, compliment even. But you behave as if you carry the torment of a thousand people upon your shoulders… why? What has made you this way? When I first dug you out of that dead bird on the ground of Kanaeghio, you were not like this. You seem… troubled."

I grunted, twisting the calibration the other way.

"Flint."

I raised my head again, but this time I didn't look at him. "G'wi, I'm not going to tell you. So just drop it."

He recrossed his arms. "No."

I looked at him.

He shook his head, stubbornly. "No."

"G'wi – " I protested.

But before I could even form the syllable of the next word, whatever it might have become, he interrupted me. "This isn't about you, nor be it about me. This is about what happened between now and the day I watched your people take you away after the fight for the second Halo was done. This is about what they did to you – whatever it was, it is not good. Not for you, not for them. You are going to die horribly, honorless, forgotten, if you do not let go of it… whatever it is. Do you want that?"

I gave him my best sarcastic laugh. "I have always been all of that. What difference would it make, G'wi, to die unchanged from the norm?"

His features drew together in a Sangheilian scowl. I'd hit a nerve. _Honorless_ was particularly unacceptable to the Elites. Evidently I'd just told him I had never owned an ounce… when in fact he'd testified against that himself at one point. If he paused to think, he'd remember it, too.

He threw me off track when what came out did not match what I'd thought he'd been thinking. "A significant one, Flint. Do not doubt your prowess is well recognized. You are an icon to more than just your own people. Your image, your presence, your capabilities are marked in the histories of many races in this wide 'verse. You cannot tarnish your own image – you would need to show it to too many audiences to make a lasting impact. You would die of old age if nothing else before you reached the halfway point in such an endeavor. Do you not see?"

I scrunched up my face, and shook my head. "Whatever you're trying to say, it didn't come out in English just then."

G'wi outright scowled at me then, for that. But he relaxed the expression shortly after, and crossed his arms. "Flint."

I briefly considered humoring him, and saying 'what?', but instead turned away, looking back down at my work. I tweaked it a little, then a lot. It still wouldn't line up. Now the correlation subroutines were twisted, too. I sighed at it. This would take longer than fifteen minutes.

"Why do they really send you out here alone, Flint?" G'wi asked, his tone softer.

My traitorous mouth answered him without my permission; "I ask them to."

He didn't say anything to that immediately, though, the way I thought he would. Instead he just nodded his long head once, and looked at the floor for several long moments as I struggled with the programming glitch in my lap.

"It's easier this way." I tried to amend, hoping to effect some useful damage control where it might do me some good. "All they have to give me are Marines. They're slow and would get in the way."

"Flint, don't patronize me." G'wi scolded, raising his head to look at me squarely. "I am not simple-minded, nor am I a child."

I dropped my hands across the calibrator hub sitting on my armored knees, and looked back at him, feeling scorned and hurt at once. Why couldn't he just be a good friend and leave me alone? He'd been pretty good to me in the past – sketchily, but good nonetheless. Why not now?

"I was coming to get you when I saw you leave the quarter where I left you." He added, quietly, as if to ensure any prying ears would not hear it clearly. "I saw you strike the door. I saw the way you walked the corridor to get here. I know you owe me nothing, but it is very likely in both of our best interests if I know the source of your agitation. Is it the ship? Have you great difficulty riding Sangheili vessels? Is it myself, an echo of your tormented past?"

I snorted, dropping my gaze back to my lap. "Hardly."

"Then obviously, I require some explanation of you."

I ran a hand over my face, feeling each muscle the action took as they rolled in tandem along my arm and shoulder. It was strange, and haunting, these moments of absolute clarity I kept experiencing. Was it the dreams, doing it? Was it some other symptom of a third source? I could sense everything all at once, with completion. But I couldn't process that much information in such massive quantities, and it always left me blind as a bat for several minutes.

"Flint."

I left the hand over my face.

"Flint."

Behind my closed eyes, I could almost see him bringing that sword down across me, cutting me in half across the chest. G'wi and I had not tried to kill one another since before the capture that had ended with my execution. In the times that we had, he'd never had a sword to have used, let alone ever gotten to use one. I knew that. I understood that. But the line between memory of actual events and memory of dreamed ones was blurring.

I didn't even know if I'd dreamed the escape from High Charity or if that part was real. Or if I had ever really gotten swarmed by an army of Flood while John got away. Or if I had piloted the Phantom that got me into that situation or not. Much of the perception I could recall was detached, oddly, as if I were out-of-body while processing the data my senses had received from each environment.

"Flint…?"

"If I told you," I began, hearing my voice come out slightly weaker than I remembered giving it permission for, "you would only join me."

"You are a Spartan." G'wi countered, as if that alone was any kind of argument. He elaborated, though; "That makes you a part of something bigger than yourself. A part of a group, a fragment of the whole. This, in turn, means that you are not meant to shoulder anything, no matter how great or slight it might be, alone."

I took my hand from my face when I felt weight settle on that shoulder. He'd put his hand on it. I looked at him.

"You are not the extent and breadth of the Human military. You are allowed faults – you are allowed to rest, and recover, while others take up the slack until your return. Take a moment for yourself, Flint. Perhaps no Spartan has ever done as much… but in this case, even in as little as I know about you, about Spartans or Humans in general… I can look at you and tell you what I see is not good."

I wasn't sure how to take that, so I sat silent, staring at him.

He inclined his head towards me. "And you may, should you have need, share what troubles you. Perhaps in the act you might find solution… or at the least, solace."

"If 'Taramee told you about his last mission… why are you even needing to ask?" I countered, feeling weak and impotent. How could someone so alien, so bizarre, know just how to push all the right buttons to rob me of armament and armor at once? I wanted so badly just to argue that he was wrong, to push him away and rebuke him, but it wouldn't come out. I had no ammunition.

G'wi cocked his head at me. "This is about that? I admit I did not receive a great many details. But surely… he described your decay beginning before you parted ways at the conclusion of that run."

Oh… so that might be why he had not expressed any pretense of sympathy for the absent 'Taramee or those he kept close. I didn't want his pity. I didn't even want his condolences. But I didn't know how to tell him that that incident – as terrible as it had been – was hardly the culmination of my problems. How could I explain that I didn't _know_ what was wrong with me?

I shook my head, brushed his hand from my shoulder, and returned to the calibrator. "Not about that." Maybe later, when I had more words. As foolish as the notion had been, I had honestly hoped the mention of 'Taramee and his unfortunate brood might derail this seemingly creepy psychic episode G'wi was having on me. I had, it seemed, failed miserably. Now he wanted grisly details.

I knew if he didn't leave the Longsword soon, I was either going to fall completely apart and be ruined as a Human being forevermore, or I was going to blow up on him, and either he or I would wind up dead for our trouble. Either way, I knew I couldn't stand much more of this. I was at the end of my wits, emotionally exhausted, and left hung in an empty void of weary apathy.

There were days when I regretted having learned to let myself care.

"Flint."

"You keep saying that, and someone is going to think you've a broken component in your head, and your vocals are stuck on repeat." I snapped.

He laughed, startling me.

I stared at him for a moment, puzzled as to what in the world I could have said that he'd find so amusing.

Quieting, G'wi reached over, and lifted the calibrator from my thighs to set it on his own. Once it was there, he adjusted it just once, then held it up and offered it back to me. When I took it, I looked at the meter, and saw that it was all perfectly lined up. I sat still, staring through the readouts, feeling hollow. I was surprised he even knew what I was doing, let alone how to do it, but more so that he could get it so right so fast.

I was also scathing at the spinning ideas that he'd done me that service directly after I had snapped at him. A moment later I would have socked him in the mouth… but then he went and did me this favor.

Weakly, I asked, "What time is it?"

"It has been ten Human-standard hours since your arrival."

"Ten." I echoed, trying to sort that.

Out of my peripheral, I saw G'wi nod his head. "You stayed in the quarter for the majority of those."

I nodded, then, and began to quickly disconnect everything. Once it was free, the first thing I did was pull the helmet back over my head. I wanted environmental anonymity, and I needed that security quickly. I didn't need G'wi to see when I let my tormented expression show. I was good at not moving obvious things – but wearing a dead face had never been a talent of mine.

Right then I just wanted to scream.

* * *

After spending a few hours hiding behind my armor, I did feel a little better. It was not unlike a part of me – an extension of my body. It responded to me that way, and that was how I liked it. This particular sentiment was fairly common among Spartans, truth be told. For me, though, the Mjolnir was a security blanket I'd never outgrown.

Without it, I was more than just exposed… I hated that. I knew I relied on my tools of war too much, knew it was a growing weakness of mine, but I couldn't make myself let go. They kept me sane for that much longer.

My current condition only made them that much more important to me.

G'wi took me up to see the command deck, where I finally got to meet the aforementioned Sasaak. He was a wiry, bitter-looking old officer, but while I thought he had one of those permanent scowls etched onto his features, he didn't harbor any resentment in his glossy black eyes.

When he spoke, he sounded speculative most of the time, though the one time he directly addressed me – and that only after G'wi informed him that I was 'that Human' who had the Elite name attached to me – he sounded more curious than indignant.

I got the impression that while I was a passing interest as a novelty, I was not necessarily welcome on the bridge. G'wi transformed from in charge of the project to being just one of the ranking grunts. He might be in charge of some of the other grunts, but he was not ship crew, and if they stopped off anywhere they couldn't blast from orbit, it would be G'wi's crowd that departed to ground.

I wondered why nobody had told me about that detail before now, but in the end it wasn't that important. Still, I liked to gather as much data as I could about any given situation – and finding 'Taramee outranked G'wi nowadays had put me a little back on my heels. It was certainly a bit of a shocker, considering G'wi had once been the Honor Guard, and 'Taramee was just the biggest splitlip on the block when I'd first met him.

It occurred to me then that I had never asked him what rank or order he'd been then. Maybe that casual mention that Honor Guardship was something of a black mark meant more than I'd given it credit for. I decided to ask the old guy what black armor meant after we were done taking up space on the command deck, as I knew that Elites used uniform color rather than insignia to denote who was what.

Strange practice.

Somehow, by the time we made it back off the command deck and down into the halls again, I'd forgotten my question. Needless to say, it never got asked. In my defense, this was not because of a lax mind – on the contrary, it was more because my mission was at hand, and I was busily conjuring plans, tactics, and assembling protocol. Getting to a runaway frigate was one thing… getting inside took one of two things; the hatch lock coding, or a cutting torch.

I had neither. G'wi picked four of his black-clad compatriots and went with me, flying the Phantom himself. I turned the exterior sound filters off, unwilling to listen to the machine's pulsing when the sound was closely attributed to the weight of a dead baby in my arms. The last thing I needed right then was to remember that mess.

I elected to sit shotgun – in as much as one can, inside a cockpit – to watch as the stars fell away around a soft, seafoam-green world covered in wispy white precipitation. I spotted a large hurricane in the southern hemisphere, but I couldn't tell land from ocean, so it was hard to tell where that storm was or what it was up to. Tossing the waves around was alright, I supposed, but if it was coming ashore, it might leave some foul weather – and poor sightlines – for my task. The pirate had taken two to the engines, I'd been told, but the explosion of the fuel cores within them had only destroyed their control – and not their speed.

As a result, the ship had nose-dived into its target, and sooner than expected. The ship was going nowhere, but she had still gotten aground. To have stopped that end would have needed a ship as big or bigger than it, with about six times as much structural armoring, and a pilot good enough to get in front and pull back on the throttle until all inertia was gone.

Apparently, the Elites didn't have any such kind of ship on hand. Clouds blew past, then rain slicked over the fore view shield. I sighed. My spirits did lift somewhat when we came out from under the storm's farthest arm before slowing, and a moment later than that, I spotted my target at last. I'd wondered if I ever would, after being caught in the pirate's cunning little trap and blown shy a wing, but now the frigate lay in a trench right before my eyes.

I was certain that at least eight or ten of the lowermost levels were crushed flat floor to ceiling, given the nature of the landing the ship had endured, but the odds of it even landing in the upright position – and not upside down, for instance – were rather slim, given the crew had had no steering when it happened.

"Where are you putting us down?"

"On the top. No sense trying to find a way in through compressed metal." G'wi answered.

I nodded. Seemed sound enough to me. When he'd gotten the Phantom where he wanted it, he put it into park, and dropped the gravity beam sans opening the side doors, and rose from his seat.

Seeing I hadn't moved yet, he hesitated, standing there facing me. "Aren't you coming? Neither I nor my Elites know what it is we are after, in there."

I stuck a gloved finger to my golden visor and rubbed, as if having spied a splotch or spot on the glass that bothered me. In truth, there was no such removable blemish… and I have no idea why I did that. But it gave G'wi something to frown at.

"Flint, get up." He commanded. "You're here, your mission beckons."

"I know." Thing was, now that I was finally there… I felt absolutely no inclination whatsoever to get up and go do it. None at all. It was a really weird feeling…

"Flint." G'wi crossed his arms… this time with meaning. He was annoyed. "Now, Flint."

"Okay, okay." I stood, and turned out of the cockpit, permitting myself a short grumble just for the sake of it, stepping across the back to the iris over the beam and in. I swear I fell faster than I ought to have, but my boots didn't seem to strike harder than they ought, so I didn't comment.

Maybe G'wi was right… maybe I did have some kind of problem that was worth sharing… either way, his proverbial boot in my rear had a magical effect, and the moment my feet touched the outer hull of my target, I was back in the game.

Immediately I circumvented the other Elites, and headed across towards the aft, where I was pretty certain there would be some kind of maintenance hatch or secondary deck seal that I could blast open with a few well-placed stripes of plastic. Carving through the hull itself – any given hull at all – was going to be an all day affair, and I wasn't that patient. I also didn't really like cutting on metal plates all that much, either.

Something I tended to avoid, as much as possible.

Around the raised sensor hub forward of the secondary relays – tall antenna things that had all burned off during entry – I found what I sought. The door proved big enough to permit G'wi to drop his Phantom through to the inside, leading me to believe that there was some kind of work bay, or maybe a storage compartment beneath it.

I dropped to a knee at the main lock, and began to apply a worm of plastic sufficient to get the job done. I didn't need to really open the thing, as it was far too big to wrest manually. It was also a double door, one that latched with teeth in the middle, so all I really had to do was break one of them out of its track bed, and it'd fall in. That would make a sufficiently large enough hole for all six of us to jump in shoulder to shoulder.

With room to spare for another hundred guys or so, too.

Having followed me, the Elites all stood around watching me apply the plastic, and looking at me like I was nuts. Maybe I was, but what I was doing wasn't all that irrational. I had just finished laying the last necessary bit when I realized I was now standing on an emergency personnel hatch built right into the middle of the secondary bay door.

I grumbled at it, and settled for another small circle on that one, which I then blew open. The circle launched upwards, remarkably enough, and one of G'wi's guys had to duck to the side to keep from being brained by it. He called an oath at me, or at least I'm sure that's what it was, because he said it in that guttural Elite language that they speak sometimes.

I just shrugged, and stepped into my new entrance. And then I discovered that it was a mighty _long_ way to the bottom…

My boots struck deck plating with a horrible clang, but while the lights were on at the bottom of that insanely long drop, there was nobody home. What got my attention – and my MA6B into my hands – was the nature of the mess I'd just dropped into. Tools and equipment lay scattered around the place in utter chaos, working machine fluids drooled over the top like some kind of mock sauce. To my left was a lift hauler, smoldering and bent, the smoke still pouring out of its engine compartment even though no flames were anylonger visible.

A battle had taken place in here.

Just a heartbeat before I would have taken a step forward, I was knocked into from behind, and I dropped onto my face. The MA6B got loose of my hands and spun away out of reach too quickly for me to stop it, so I latched onto what had landed on me with what I did still have – both hands.

In the span of about a second I'd torn it off my back, brought it over a shoulder onto the floor in the middle of a glossy black pool filled with loose nuts and washers, and had secured it there under a knee and one hand, with my other drawn back for my first actual hit.

There I paused.

G'wi, poor unfortunate soul that he was, gasped inward, then gagged on it. "Forerunners, Flint! Let me up."

Sheepishly, I dropped my poised fist, and used my grasp on his armored vest to haul him back to his feet. "Sorry." There, I let go, and turned away, seeking what had become of my rifle. As I was retrieving it, and wiping off the goo that was now all over one side of it, I heard the second Elite strike bottom behind me.

Gah… I really was losing my mind.

When I shouldered it for the second time, I heard a noise that did not coincide with the entrance of G'wi's Elites at all. "Wait… you hear that?" I asked.

"Hear what?" G'wi asked, stepping up beside me. "I hear many things… most I do not credit to living intervention."

"That hum." I elaborated, looking around again. I was about to ask him if he had any guesses what it might be when it changed pitch… and then it struck me. "They're bringing the engines back online! There's no way they've repaired two direct hits to the manifolds this fast."

G'wi looked at me squarely, then. "Do not expect to find your kind aboard this craft, Flint… the Flood are neither slow nor impeded by manufactured goods."

To that, I grumbled. Leading out of the bay, I took the first route I could think of that I saw that would lead me and my meager backup to the forward manifest. There, I hoped to find the data center, and hopefully the stolen ONI data was inside it. If it wasn't, then scouring the whole ship looking for it would be a terrible waste of lives and time. Flood, as I had well learned the _last_ time I had met some, were not easy to get through or around.

That they had already come once meant my initially small time window was smaller still, more so than I enjoyed. To their credit, the Elites accompanying me stayed close, and kept scanning the side passages I led them past. At least we'd have forewarning before we were all ripped apart and turned into more Flood…

Now that was a dismal thought.

I spent the next couple of minutes mentally kicking myself for being such a terrible pessimist, but I really couldn't help it – there was nothing ideal about a situation that involved the Flood. We made the messhall, and I took a cut through it, passing huge ugly green puddles of Flood puke, and the occasional splash or smear of Human blood. There were no bodies, at least until I made the entrance to the bridge itself.

There, I found the only soul who had somehow managed to keep himself from becoming Flood food… and that might have had something to do with the stricken expression on his face, the grenade pin in his left hand, and the utter lack of a middle the man had. That was a rather disgusting mess he'd left… stepping through it for lack of anywhere to put my feet that wasn't an inch thick in Human goo, I proceeded to squish for the next ten or twenty strides until the floor grating's texture wore it off my boots again.

I knew I'd left tracks. Most everything in the command center was smashed, even the keyboards and the displays, as if someone had come through with a hammer and made a point of chopping down on every flat surface there was to be had. It looked a little odd, to be sure. Even explosive decompression didn't look quite like this. Had someone been playing duck-and-run with a Flood form that had only its fists to fight with?

I shook my head, and went to the main data console, as obliterated as it was, and lifted the shattered sheath off. Setting that aside, I poked through the battered components and wires for a while before finding something I could hook to, and got out my jacks and cords.

G'wi stepped past me, trying to get a feel for the place, but he looked more apprehensive with each passing moment. He knew the longer we stayed, the more manpower we'd need to get back out. And six guys wasn't much of a force when the Flood was involved.

I well imagined he'd calculated we'd need well over a battalion before I was done, but when he turned to look at me with that inquisitive look on his face, it was hard as hell not to shake my head at him. Not to be cruel in humor at his unwarranted tension. More because the equipment was glitzing on and off with power surge after power surge due to the tatty condition of the engine repair the Flood was doing.

With it doing that nonsense, there was no telling what data was in the archives… if any.

G'wi scowled. "This is a waste of time."

"Not to me." I said. Even if he ditched me here, I imagined I could probably find some kind of flying craft in one of the bays to make my exit with, though given that this was a civilian retrofit, I wasn't liable to find much that would get me very far. I had to be nice, I realized, a little too late to stop my comment. "Give me five more minutes," I amended, stepping over to the electronically mangled mess attached to the Captain's chair.

Maybe this wasn't nearly so badly hurt. I found blood drooled all through the components on that setup, though, a dismal state to be sure. Still, by the time I was connected and jacked in, the power had finally stopped fluctuating, and what little I did get was uninterrupted.

"Well?" G'wi demanded, his patience wearing on his temper. Give him an hour and he'd be in one of those murderous rages his kind had from time to time.

"From what I can tell… there's almost nothing left of the memory banks." I admitted, sourly. "But there's no evidence the ONI intel was ever plugged in, either."

"You cannot be serious…" It was something of a cross between a plea and a demand.

"I want to check the command quarters before we go." I told him. "Let's get moving. The sooner I'm done, the sooner we're out of here."

My statement had the desired effect, remarkably, and it soothed his agitation for a moment as I led the way back off the bridge and back through that mangled corpse filling up the only open passageway. I didn't look at it twice. Even Spartans have a sense of gross… and that was a five star yuck laying there.

I had to smash the door to the Captain's quarters open with the butt of my rifle, as it was either stuck or locked, and wouldn't open. I found no one hiding inside, though, making me wonder why it was kept locked. I rummaged for a full minute, shaking things out and turning things over and pulling things apart, before I found the detached air duct grill.

Ah, so that's why the door was locked… someone didn't want to be caught half-out of a duct pipe. I spared the sight a chuckle, and moved on. Standing erect in the reader, but with the reader's contacts disconnected, I finally found a data chip. I looked at it for a moment before reaching back and plugging the thing into the slot in the back of my helmet, but before anything happened, I saw G'wi give me the oddest of looks.

Then my HUD rolled over a sheath of binary coding, and I felt my armor stall out and reboot halfway. This sudden system glitch caused an involuntary stagger on my part, as the armor first locked tight, then dropped me, and then came back online proper like so I could catch my suddenly missing balance again.

There was a cool, liquid feeling pulsing through my skull.

_A Spartan? I'm honored._

I balked. "You're an AI?? They didn't tell me you were an AI!"

_Calm down, 093. Yes, I am an Artificial Intelligence. My firewalls were sufficient to prevent the Captain from accessing any of my data logs, so everything is still secure. I hope you had an escape plan._ The voice was sort of masculine, but I didn't recognize it. The tone, however, told me that the AI recognized me.

Whatever that meant, I'd need to investigate later. "Just stop right there… don't say anything else. You'll distract me." I turned to the door, and with the fourth grumble of my day, started for it.

"Did you find what you sought?" G'wi asked, as I emerged.

"Yeah. Let's beat it." I shouldered my MA6B and made at a trot for that messy secondary bay where we'd come in. Barely had I reached the second bend in the hall when the first of the Flood turned up. What had once been crew began to scream and charge at us, the vast majority of the combat forms coming our way still holding the same weaponry they had held when fighting off the Flood that had turned them. I dropped the first three with well-placed three-round bursts through their unarmored chests, obliterating the controlling organism embedded within. After that, plasma and carbine rounds filled up the corridor, and mowed my path for me.

I was about to believe for a moment that the group had been small, and it would be another few corridors or so before we found more, but barely had the first bunch stopped gurgling on the floor when more showed up to replace them.

Flood forms poured out of every conceivable nook, cranny, side passage and broken door, swarms of the little white pus bubbles pouring past their stomping feet as they came. I fired until my magazine was dry, then hesitated a running step to fall into the middle of my companions while I reloaded. The empty magazine replaced the full one I'd taken out of that ammo pouch, and jacking the action bar, I raised the barrel and went again.

Bullets zinged off our collective shielding, calcite claws raking past fractions of seconds before the owners of the claws were left behind, felled or not. I had neither time nor ammunition to clear the sector, nor did I care to try. But the combat… it was exhilarating.

For the first time in nearly a year, there was no clarity, no chaos, no shaking torment scratching at the edges of my mind. There was only the here, the now, myself and G'wi and his Elites, and the hail of bullets and gore we charged through. Sure was nice to be normal again. Even for just a breath.

Right as I caught myself smiling, that accursed ONI AI piped up… and he didn't do it lightly, either, sufficing only with a sudden, sharp, commanding yell. _Down!_

I don't know what possessed me to, but down I went. I dropped to my knees, tucked my head in and rolled over my shoulders, and as I came back up, I saw the trail of smoke above me… it soon became evident it was at chest-level, as a loud crunch resonated behind me, followed instantly by a thunderous exhalation, and a heartbeat after, it detonated, throwing me forward onto my face.

I clawed frantically back to my feet, unready to die and unwilling to let the Flood do it to me, but then I had to stand there and blast back the creatures from all sides – and I do mean all sides – while the Elites crawled back upright around me. Sealed within my environmental armor, I suppose I was fortunate in that I missed the one part of being on top of an exploding rocket that the others had not… brilliant purple blood dribbled from every mandible, dizziness obvious in all their glossy black eyes.

I eventually found and took down the one holding that monster of a weapon, before it could launch the other tube, but in my twisting, shooting dance, I saw the first round had blown bits of one of the Elites all over the back half of the Flood coming after us. I imagined that had I not ducked when I'd been told to, it would have creamed both of us.

I ran out of ammo in the clip I had in the gun before the splitlips were ready to get back in the fight, and I instantly got swamped for my trouble. The sudden prompting got their sluggish selves back into the swing, though, even as I hammered at half-rotted heads and limbs with the butt of my rifle, and when that wasn't enough, my fists.

Groping, swinging, striking limbs raked past all of us, the zombies doing their level best to bring us down. Finally, I got the old mag out. I slammed the sharp, open end into the face of a particularly persistent bugger, yanked it out as he fell back, and quickly swapped it with a fresh mag. I didn't have time to slam it home in the gun when one of the Elites ducked a hard punch behind me, and the swing came and got me.

I dumped right into the arms of the Flood forms to my front, mangling a few and crushing pieces of others, as my half-ton armored carcass toppled over. I flailed a little, alarmed that my balance was out again, but before I could swim to the bottom, I felt a hand close around my neck.

I guess I couldn't really complain… it was all he had in reach that he could rightly grab with just one hand…

G'wi hauled me back, standing me upright before shoving me forward again, this time braced for it and more than willing to charge an opening if it meant I still had a spare round or two in my last clip when we made the Phantom. I elbowed the path at first, slamming back an opening through the crush. When I slowed for the thickness of it, the Elites pressed in behind me, and gave me the torque I needed to get through the last of them.

Out the other side, I slammed the magazine home, and jacked the slide. The next Flood form to come up the corridor took three to the chest, and was down before we got to it. I made as much of a straight route as I could, to cut off time from our exit, moving quickly and for as much as the constant gunfire would allow, quietly.

Making the bay where we'd come in didn't help that much, though… and I quickly found it was a rather poor choice of locations to make a stand. The place had filled with Flood that had not started out as crewmen, but were those huge, ugly, almost boneless things that would rearrange themselves when their current shape bored them.

Four pulled down and began to fire bone fragments at us. After the first volley had cut out nearly half my shielding, the next rank back scuttled up to us and lifted their structure into the hulking variation. I grabbed the nearest Elite to me, stuck my boot on his hip, and launched from his brace onto the closest hulk's shoulders, bringing it down. I felt a little heartened when I heard the first sword pop to life, but when I turned, I saw three of the hulking variety lift the sword-wielder from the floor, and between them, pull him apart.

His scream died in a bloody gurgle, and the blade fell from his limp grasp to deactivate on the slimy floor. I dove for it.

Flood both large and small swarmed in, crushing one another in their over eager need to get at us. We were down two, and our exit was blocked by too many. I refused to despair, churning my mind for something, anything, that I could use.

Then it hit me.

I yanked the pin on a frag, and tossed it at the door to the corridor where we'd come in a moment ago, and when it erupted and cleared a significant circle in the crowd, I reached for two of the remaining three Elites and hauled ass for that spot.

It filled in, but not fast enough, the third Elite bringing up my rear as I pushed the other two ahead. There, we formed a circle, hacking chunks off of the ones too close to shoot, and shooting down the ones too far to hack chunks from. When I had what I hoped was a good footing, I piped up;

"You're an ONI spook, right?"

The AI made an indignant noise. _Strictly speaking, so too are you._

"Find the detonator switch for the active bud and punch it for me, will you? My hands are full." I told it.

There was a pause, then the loudest thunderous bang I'd ever heard happened over our heads. In the span of time it took to blink, the near half of the bay's ship door cracked loose, and in the instantaneous split second following, smacked spectacularly into the floor below it. Every Flood standing in that area was immediately rendered as flat, vomit-colored soup, leaving us home free for our exit…

We just had to make it up the darn thing without getting pulled back down by our ankles. The three Elites broke for it before I did, leaving me to bring up the rear. I ran backwards, hammering the enemy line with every shot I had. When one of the forms in back got impatient and took a flying leap at me, I just sliced it in half and kept shooting at its buddies.

I found it slightly awkward to wield my MA6B in one hand and an Elite's sword in my other, but the combination worked rather nicely for what I was up against at the moment. I expended the next five magazines with my back against the ladder, unable to turn and ascend it due to the proximity of the pressing Flood. Infection forms swarmed around the stomping, mincing feet of the bigger kind, those kept at bay only an arm's length and only by the energy blade I had in my left hand.

When I had to hack hard and brutal against the seemingly impervious skin of one of the boneless variety to get through it with the blade, though, I threw out that shoulder. Pain lanced down that arm and across my collarbones, the spasm resulting causing me to stab myself with the bottom rear point under my hand when I tucked in that arm.

While having been able to grit my teeth against my annoyingly bum shoulder's antics, I was completely unprepared to be gored on an energy blade, and when I curled over the wound, the Flood hammered in. Claws raked me at every angle, fists smacking off my armor the instant the last of the simmering shield gave up.

I tried to fight them, waving the blade wildly above me, but the more of them I cut down, the more of them filled in, pressing the ones unable to fight on out of the way. All of them wanted a piece of me, it seemed, and none of them were willing to wait their turn. I felt it when one of the big ones caught a tentacled hand around my good arm, dragging me almost forcibly out from under the seething mass of tangled Flood forms, hauling up on my heavy carcass until I was loose of the majority of them.

The thing gurgled madly at me, but it, like the one before it, took some serious hacking to get chopped up. The blade flickered when I was dropped, letting me know I'd just about expended the thing's power source. That meant I was in trouble…

Where the thing I'd just hacked apart lay suddenly lit up in a bright, shimmering purple, lines of goo and dribbles of Flood guts heading upwards within it. I swung the last of the blade's power through the six vying behind me, and leapt into the beam, hurtling upwards out of reach a fraction of a second before the next Flood up would have snagged me.

I reached the interior of the Phantom and rolled to my side off the iris, and just as I caught sight of the pursuing Flood beneath it, the seal closed, and the beam cut out. Doubtless that form would fall to its gory death far below… the drop was not a short one.

The only two Elites in the back with me were standing there looking down at me, the exhausted sword of their fallen brother in one hand, the utterly disgusting rifle still locked in my other grasp… but I stayed on my side on the floor, heaving for breath through my permanent grimace.

Not only was my shoulder still screaming at me, now my guts were on fire, too. I let the dead hilt slide out of my grasp, wishing with all my heart that I could just put some pressure on that wound, but I couldn't seem to make my bad arm move anymore… had I really gotten it out of socket? Releasing the rifle as well, I hauled downward with that arm instead, and tucked it around my seeping middle.

I guessed I was glad I hadn't wound up lying on the old wound… but having it agitate like this really had me ticked. If I hadn't brought a bad shoulder to that fight, I would never have stuck myself in the guts, and I would still have been standing right now.

Worse…

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the expanding clarity remained. Sounds once soft became thunderous, sights once dim became brightly contrasted and detailed. Most of all, feeling once subtle now screamed at the top of its metaphorical lungs, right into my poor battered brains.

* * *

I spent most of the ride back to Sasaak's ship in a daze, the unnatural amplification of the pain putting me in a disoriented delirium. I was only vaguely aware that I was moved once the Phantom finally docked, but I'm sure I heard someone say something about a ship-to-ship battle going on outside.

I didn't get any details, but I guessed the Flood did get the pirate's frigate off the ground, likely shortly after I'd left it behind, and then come after me. Being little more than limp, that left Sasaak and his bridge crew to handle the situation. By the tone of the words exchanged, I guessed it was a frightening prospect, the Flood having a ship, but a non-threatening battle, being as the ship I was on now was a war bird, and the pirate hadn't even had a MAC.

Some minor shielding, and a few rail guns, but nothing going to hurt a fully powered ex-Covenant cruiser like this one. I lay where I was put for what felt like a year, my mind broiling in unexpressable agony, before anyone came back through.

This person, whoever they were, looked pink and floaty, but though I couldn't really see who or what it was, it seemed to know just exactly how to disassemble my Mjolnir, and get it off of me. I didn't understand the mechanics of motor function at the time, but I did feel it when something glanced off the wound in my side, and also when my body convulsed in response.

Right about then, I was introduced to a flavor that tasted far too strange to be anything I'd ever known before… but it remained naggingly familiar. I wondered if I was dreaming again, but almost as soon as the thought suggested itself to me, the clarity began to fade as reality the way it was meant to be experienced checked back in.

I let go a ragged breath, blinking dizzily at my new surroundings. Where was this? Not to say it was strange inherently – the architecture was old-Covenant, the color scheme was purple, and there was pretty much nothing at all in the way of decoration or embellishment to the otherwise plain picture. But it was a large, almost bay-like room, and for consideration to a race who didn't really value medical technology that much, I was almost convinced it was just that – a medical bay.

I'd been sprawled across something of a cross between a high bunk and a low exam table, but I couldn't remember why my armor was missing. It was just me up there, in my skinsuit. Three Elites wearing a dun pearl outfit – it wasn't armor – were present, but I didn't know who any of them were. They also appeared very strange in a way I couldn't put my finger on. One was nearby, the other two a ways off.

And practically above me on my other side, was that floaty pink thing. ONI called them Engineers… gaseous tentacleoid creatures who had a real knack for machinery and the guts thereof.

So what was this one doing, floating over me? I wasn't a machine.

When I tried to sit up, the Elite grabbed me to stop me, but I relaxed back to the surface I was on more for the shooting knives in my side than for the alien's recommendation. Tasting my teeth, I realized I did know, after all, what that strange flavor in my mouth was… it was that unmistakable metallic protein flavor every soldier knew.

My blood.

I had just frowned at the implications that that wrought when a door I couldn't see hissed, suggesting it had opened. Still in his armor, and still covered in smears of Flood pudding, G'wi appeared around the edge of my peripheral, drawing nearer at a walk until he was standing next to the other Elite beside me.

The other guy looked… small… narrower, smaller, shorter… with far fairer facial feature construction, too. I guessed that that was why he looked so odd. Maybe he was a kid, or something… not done growing up.

"Are you lucid?" G'wi asked, interrupting my musings.

I got out the first syllable of the word I had in mind when I realized speaking hurt as much as trying to sit up did… so I shut my mouth and nodded.

"Good." The lights changed, switching from a blue to a yellow, far dimmer as well, and the sound of the ship's pulse switched rhythms. "The Shipmaster discovered more of a fight than he was prepared for, when the Flood followed us into orbit. They built more than just the broken ship's engines, and the fight was… shall we say… brutal."

I had something to say to that, but I didn't feel inclined to say it.

"Shipmaster Sasaak determined the depth of the damage his vessel could take and then withdrew; he found it within honor to do so given that you and your package were aboard. Risking angering your people for the sake of the conclusion of a battle at this time was not considered wise."

I offered my best inquisitive look. It was more to make him get to the point.

He crossed his arms. "I am telling you this, Flint, because we made a random jump through slipspace to prevent the Flood's meager tracking skills from netting them more food." He paused for a moment, then added, "and we have found something."

Oh, boy, not again. I grimaced at him.

"Do not look at me like that, human." G'wi grumped, frowning back at me. "It is only a transmitter beacon… given our location it was considered an unusual discovery."

Keeping the grimace, I cocked one eyebrow at him. What did that have to do with me?

"We identified it as a Human device." G'wi answered. "When you are done here, the Shipmaster wishes to speak with you."

Now that… that I deemed worth a grunt. It was probably all I would have done even without my current impediments, anyway. When it was out, I braced for the pain, but the punishment I got was less than last time, making me wonder just what that small fry was doing to me… or if it was that pink floaty thing doing it.

Either option was equally as creepy.


	2. No Luck

**2; NO LUCK**

I have no idea how, but the pink floaty thing... the Engineer, excuse me... had done a fairly nice patch job. While I still felt rather nauseated and the now-closed injury still ached, it nolonger kept me off my feet. Upright helped, I guess, with the nausea, as whenever I got below standing height, my guts would churn.

I wondered if that had anything to do with the nature of my repair, or if it was just because of the nature of the injury. I really hoped I didn't become septic and go into shock... and die horribly. The sad truth was I hadn't been sick since the Spartan program had found me, and I was unprepared for all the horrid details of doing it again.

Still, for the immediate moment, I was alright, and I walked up the corridor to the bridge without help. Sasaak turned to look when I came through the door, but he didn't let me mount the command dias, rather coming down from it to greet me. "You look decidedly green, for a being supposed to stay brown."

Without my Mjolnir - and no honest idea where in the world they'd stashed it - I found myself somewhat in doubt of the splitlip's comment. "Brown?" I asked.

He inclined his head. "Come, look at the signal your buoy has been transmitting." He turned away, so I followed him over to the holographic display where the readings were all in that odd henscratch-Forerunner-glyph-combo, and I couldn't read any of it. The glyphs all looked familiar, though... and I got the impression that there was more there than just rendered images that meant nothing to me.

"Looks like a distress call." I mentioned, the words falling out of my mouth without my permission. I grimaced at the screen. What in god's name was wrong with my tongue?

Sasaak looked at me. "Is it? For what, though? There is nothing in this sector. The buoy must have drifted."

A thought struck me. A UNSC comn buoy, way out here...? I looked back at the Elite. "Is it transmitting coordinates, by any chance?"

That earned me a curious look, but Sasaak called down the question, and the sensor readings were recalibrated to find out. When the answer came back, he turned a fairly surprised expression towards me. "How did you know?"

"Feeling." I answered, starting to get that buzz of excited anticipation. I'd found him! I'd really found him! Boy, was I excited... just the _idea_ that I might be able to find him and bring him home... that was enough to erase hours of angst and frustration. For the first time in years, I smiled a happy smile.

"Why are you smiling, Human?" Sasaak asked. He looked at me with one of those suspicious expressions not often appreciated when on one of his kind, and aimed at one of mine.

"You found John." I told him, elated. "You really found him."

* * *

G'wi looked grumpy when I saw him next, but he wasn't dirty anymore and he wasn't wearing his black armored outfit anymore, either. He was walking the corridor in a high-collared tucked tunic and leggings with what appeared to be some kind of soft-topped boot or something at the bottom. He looked odd, this being the first time I'd ever seen the guy without his combat gear on.

Even though I felt naked without my armor, I was still smiling. G'wi had never seen me smile, I was pretty sure, given the underlying value of the circumstances which we tended to interact within. But he knew what a Human smile looked like, as his expression softened into quizzical as his head came up, obviously interested to know what I'd gotten into to so effect the change in mood.

I knew I'd never felt this happy before now - not since adolescence, and enduring the seemingly incessant patting on the back I'd gotten for completing my first real mission successfully. Now, though... being able to find and retrieve a fellow Spartan, a brother, that was a high point for me. After my return to Earth too late to get to see him, I had thought I would be the only one around for a long, long while.

Now, though I was never a member of Alpha Team, I would still get to have an old teammate back. That it was John made it even better. Now if I could just find some of the others.

We tended to know without asking which of our number had died and which were truly missing, even though not a single one of our names got listed under 'deceased'. Spartans couldn't die, not in the public eye. It killed morale, or so the brass excused. What would have killed my morale was to see how easily those unkillable folks disappeared... and further, to know that once missing, they never seemed to turn back up.

Really - what good was a Spartan who was still alive if they were missing forevermore, and were never anywhere where they could do any good? A Spartan was only as good as his location permitted him or her to be.

G'wi, though, didn't know any of that. His puzzled expression darkened into a suspicious frown. "Did they inject you with some bizarre chemical?"

I laughed, tickled he'd think I'd ever let them do that - the odds of this lot having drugs engineered for use on Humans was incalculably small. Not that anything tended to do any good on me anyway. "No."

"Then what has erased your brain?"

I offered him an incredulous look. "Erased my brain?"

"In all the long times I have known you, never once have I witnessed you to seem so happy," he explained, gesturing loosely at me. "Yet directly after gutting yourself in the presence of the parasite... you come back from repair with that alien expression on your face."

I cocked a brow at him. "Alien."

He grumbled at me.

"As soon as I can convince him to go there, I'll be able to look for the Master Chief."

G'wi frowned thoughtfully for a moment, seeming to study my feet for the duration before looking back up and pointing a finger at me, with an inquisitive look on his face.

I grinned at him. "Just Chief. John outranks me... he's the Master Chief. Your... demon."

"Ah." He nodded once, considering all I'd told him just now. He honestly looked a little daunted to be going looking for the guy who'd butchered holes in his people's defense network back in the day before the Schism. John could plow furrows through anything, really... but a Halo's worth of Elites hadn't even slowed him down.

I considered that, then, too, and while it didn't dampen my enthusiasm, it did wrinkle my brow. I'd been rubbing elbows with Elites for a long while, pretty much before I really ought to have been. I didn't know enough about the reports from John's last mission to tell if he was even forgiving towards that recent change.

All of us Spartans had spent most of our lives killing Elites. After being told they were our friends, a lot of the unaugmented forces had balked. I had not, I surmised, only because of G'wi, and the terrible amount of mayhem we had been through together before that intel update had come down to us. Having spent much of the following time working with or around or beside them in some manner, whether I spoke with any of them or not, I was long used to their standing concerning my species.

John... might not be. Maybe it really was asking a lot of Sasaak to go and find him with just me to back up the claim that we were friendly. Still, I wasn't a patient sort, and I didn't like the idea of taking the buoy back to UNSC space, handing it to the command, and then waiting for mission clearance to send a cruiser or a frigate to go and look for him some months down the road.

Not a patient sort at all. I offered a glance to G'wi again. "You don't suppose it might be too hard... to convince Sasaak... do you?"

"That depends on your choice of words, and what you choose to say on behalf of the manner of this warrior you wish to retrieve." He put up a hand to stall anything I might say to that, even though I hadn't been thinking that fast anyway, and added, "And if it involves more Flood... you may forget the idea completely."

I sighed, my enthusiasm officially dampened. Dropping my brow as far as it would go, I grumbled, "Great."

"The last I heard of the Shipmaster, he seemed content to take you back to your people, and hope to never see you again." G'wi offered, folding his arms across his chest. Seeing him do that without the armor on reminded me of his odd new habit, and again I wondered what had got it started... or what it was that made him do it.

"I get that sentiment from a lot of people." I admitted, nodding. "But now? Can't he let me borrow something small and go after John anyway? I know he's not obligated to help me out, and I do appreciate his cooperation thus far... and that he's got little to no incentive to retrieve the Spartan in question at all... but..."

G'wi shrugged, without uncrossing his arms. "I do not know what to tell you, Flint."

I wondered if there was any way I could twist his culture against him and in my favor, but nothing came to mind. I wasn't very good at manipulation, and even less so with the subtle variety. The truth was, I was stuck, and even the one Elite aboard who might vouch for me didn't know what to say this time. I sighed. My happiness was all but gone, now. Here I had finally found John - a thing I never thought would happen, given the nature of his disappearance - and I was forced to turn my back and leave him out there, in whatever situation, regardless how good or bad it was.

It had been six years... seven? ... six and some change. If he was out there, if he was still kicking, he was likely out of rations, out of places to get anything more, and if the situation was hostile, very likely out of ammo too. My recent encounter with the Flood made my normally pessimistic mind conjure some rather dismal scenarios.

And I could do nothing about it.

"G'wi, if there was someone you would go after, regardless why or when they went missing, who would it be?"

"The Prophets." He answered.

I focused on him.

"To complete their passage into the Great Journey." He explained.

I nodded, then. "Oh."

"But I do understand... in as much as I might... what you are trying to communicate to me." He offered, sounding sympathetic. "But even if I knew of some hero I would wish to retrieve at the cost of all effort or method, I do not know of a similar being in the Shipmaster's eyes... and it would be by his reckoning whether we go or stay."

"I know... the more I try to think about this, the worse it gets."

"You may ask for the loan of a small long-range craft, but beyond that, do not expect much to come of your request." He advised. "Given the nature of the de... your brother's situation, if he is even still alive after all this time, then I agree with your enthusiasm to be hasty in your retrieval of him. Waiting further may only permit you find his remains, rather than an intact warrior."

I squinted crookedly at him. "We are soldiers, G'wi, not warriors."

He unfolded his arms, and spread his hands. "Regardless."

"I don't know how to appeal to this Sassy guy, though," I admitted, resting a hand on my head.

G'wi chortled. "Sasaak."

I frowned at him. "Regardless."

* * *

Shipmaster Sasaak 'Vahatimee looked even more wizened and grizzled than ever before, when I found him in that broad chamber where the Elites all took their meals. I felt reluctant to call it a general mess due to the nature of the layout... you sat wherever the hell you could find a seat to sit on, and on one side was an opened area where a couple of the guys were duking it out with their swords.

When one of them scored a smack on his opponent, those watching hooted and laughed, earning a seething humiliated look from the so struck combatant. The fight-play was a little odd, considering they could decapitate each other on those swords all too easily. But Sasaak was sitting there watching it, appearing for all intents and purposes to be enjoying the show, totally unconcerned that his crew was one trembling inch from slaughtering one another.

Maybe that sort of behavior was normal, among his kind.

He did look up, though, telling me his senses were sharp despite the loud ruckus going on right in front of him. I had barely gotten a stride inside the door when he spotted me coming... or maybe it was my smell. G'wi had once mentioned that his kind often identified people, situations, and items more by what they smelled like than anything else. I might smell a little contaminated by all I'd been around recently, but in the end, I was still eating my own food supply, and that would keep me smelling the same old Human scent as I'd had before I got here.

I had no idea where the air vents were on this ship, though.

Once I was close enough to hear him, he spoke first. "You look as though you intend to ask something of me."

"Am I that easy to read?" I asked, coming to a stop.

He crooked his mandibles in a soft smile. "It is good to see your eyes."

My brows bounced up. "It is?"

He inclined his head towards me. "Indeed, it very much is. It allows me to know what you are thinking... and to know that I do not speak to a machine. Also... seeing your face outside that armor you and your brothers wear permits an old warrior to let go of his apprehension of your creed. Yours above all Human castes caused mine the most grief."

I felt a little disconcerted at that admission, but all I could really do was nod. What's a guy supposed to say to that, anyway?

"So. You come to me with your helmet in your hands, seeking aid."

I ran a hand over my head, feeling the short-cropped hair ripple under my touch. "In a sense." Maybe I didn't like being helmetless in front of this guy... he wasn't understating much with the admission of _It allows me to know what you are thinking_. The way he read me like a book was downright creepy.

"I may have a grasp for the manner of the beings under my command umbrella, 'Zelisee, but I am not telepathic." He cocked his head down and to the side, the way a body would when trying to get a gaze back from the floor's ownership. Thing was, I hadn't looked down.

"I want to follow the buoy's transmission." I told him, pointedly. The less I poked around and beat the bush, the less I'd have to pick up later. Sasaak seemed a body to appreciate directness, anyway. "I need your help to do that."

"The battle over the Flood world was concluded successfully with full maintenance of the quarantine." He told me. "But I took my ship out of that fight for a good reason."

"I'm not asking you to fight." I argued, feeling like he was warming up to a no regardless what I said. Maybe he wasn't so fond of bluntness as I'd thought.

He nodded. "No, you aren't. But I relayed the coordinates through the cartographer database." He set the dish of torrid-looking victuals aside, and dusted his palms together before concluding, "it is inside the same quarantine zone, 'Zelisee. I am afraid I cannot offer you what you would ask of me."

"Then let me borrow something. A Phantom, a Seraph... something to get me there. I need to see, I need to know. If he's down there, I can't leave him to the mercies of whatever infestation might be there with him."

"According to my information, your brother went missing years ago. No warrior could last years alone on a Flood-infected world." Sassak pointed out.

I fought for a moment for control of my face - right then I needed to keep my cool, and scowling openly at the commander of the ship I stood on was not going to be conducive to progress. Winning out with a pinched, forced look, I replied, "117 is not a warrior, Shipmaster, and if anyone could wipe out a Flood world by himself, it would be him."

Sasaak studied me for a long time before finally answering me; and when he did, he sounded somewhat distant. "Yours are a strange and mysterious caste of Human, 'Zelisee. Perhaps I will never understand you... but do not doubt I cannot recognize iron determination when I see it."

My tense expression lightened into a cross between my puzzlement in where he thought he was going with that thought, and the tiniest kindling of hope that maybe I might win this argument after all. I hated being so easy to read, but I couldn't really help it... some people had all the luck. I just wasn't one of them. "With or without your help, I'll find some way to go after him... but if I intend to get there any time soon or be able to do much once I get there, I'll need assistance. Right now, you're it."

He cocked his whole head at me, as if expecting me to continue.

At first my brain floundered, but then I took a swag, and ran with it; "G'wi seems to think it's doable."

Sasaak laughed lightly at me. "G'wi's brains are addled from far too many battles lost, and far too many blows to his head."

"I trust him." I blurted. A moment later, I wondered at the wisdom of that admission...

Sasaak displayed its value to me, though; His expression twisted into surprise. "Do you, now? This is news. And would you follow his lead, were he to ask the impossible of you?"

"I tend to be the one to do the asking." I corrected. "But he's never let me down... and when it was him who needed my intervention... well, I haven't heard him complain." I don't know why I was gilding that shaky truce G'wi and I had, but if buttering the relations with gold would soften Sasaak to my cause, I was willing to plate the thing so thickly that it never saw sunlight again. I wanted to go after John badly enough to set that ONI spook loose on the ship, but I wasn't ready to make that move on the basis of not knowing the AI's affiliation or loyalty complex. Cortana complimented John the way she did because she valued him above all other commanders.

The twerp I'd rescued from the pirate's frigate was a whole other story. He was, I supposed, my last-ditch option.

But Sasaak didn't prove to be that stubborn. Maybe he had a soft spot for G'wi, as addled as he proclaimed the guy to be. I don't know. But he alleviated my stewing thoughts with his reply. "We will go to the coordinates, and we will look at what we find."

Before I could react, he added,

"But if it proves rich with infection, or we find indication your brother is not there, we are leaving without setting Phantom to soil. Is that understood? We arrive, we scan, and only then do we decide our next course of action."

Who could ask for better? "Thank you, Shipmaster."

Oop... there went that bizarre urge to salute an Elite again. I fought it down, sufficing with nodding back to his nod to me, and leaving without more. The last thing I needed was to get used to taking situational conditions, or worse, orders, from a splitlip.

Shipmaster or not, I did not answer to these guys.

We just... worked well together.

* * *

The next time I saw my Longsword, it looked like a horrid heap of components and parts. Needless to say, I was a little distressed by that. There was nobody around to ask what had happened to it, but I was pretty sure I hadn't authorized them to disassemble my broken ship for parts! More, I was pretty sure that Human ship components didn't cohabitate well with Covenant ones.

So what was the point? I sorted through the heaps of hull plating, skeleton structure beams, and internal computer parts looking for something recognizable, but the only part I could really tell was familiar was the plasma screen that went over one of the forward displays. It had been completely removed from the display attachment, remaining only intact enough to preserve the fact that it was a plasma screen and not a sheet of blank glass.

I turned it over in my hands for a while before putting it back, shaking my head at the mess. Most of the extraneous things had been extricated from the ship components, so I was able to get the rations I'd come for without much trouble. But looking at the heaped remains of what had at one point been a Human Longsword long-range fighter craft made me feel a little trapped.

Now I _had_ to beg a Seraph off of Sasaak, or I would never make it home in my lifetime. Even if they took me all the way to Reach's marbled surface, I'd have to sit there for a while before someone with a Pelican could come and get me.

Not a pleasant thought.

* * *

Sasaak proved a curious sort when, upon our eventual arrival at the site of mention, we found a planet whose readings did not immediately betray any active population, be it comprised of Flood forms or otherwise. He did get a strange look on his wizened old face when he was informed of the indigenous non-sentient life.

I didn't ask, but from the looks on a lot of the faces in the room at the time, I got the distinct impression that that animal - or ecosystem of animals - did not belong on this world we were looking at.

The world in question proved to be a large, roughly Earth-and-a-half sized ball of blue and luscious purple-on-yellow, the kind that suggests foliage. It had a larger moon than Earth did, though only one, and it was not the bleached, bleak white I was used to seeing in moons. This one was a bloody red color, like oxidized iron or worse, but it glittered brightly like fiery rubies where the red giant's rays struck it. The orbit was crooked and ovular, though, leading me to think maybe the world wasn't nearly as attractive as first impressions might lend; when we found it at the aphelion of its rotation, it looked to be in an orbit-inspired winter.

Sasaak's reaction to all of this was to ask for further probes and scan details, even going so far as to "brave" a recon drone into the upper atmosphere to test for gaseous conditions. I stood there, mainly bored, with my arms tucked into one another, folded across my chest, trying not to look as bored as I felt.

One thing I did ask, was the location of my Mjolnir... I had envisioned a fate as gruesome for it as my Longsword had endured, but when I got to see it, the pink floating things hovering around it did not appear to be taking it apart. For reasons undisclosed - his claim - to the Elite who'd taken me there, I couldn't seem to get past said pink floaty things, to reclaim it.

Without permission to become harsh with the dratted annoyances - rather, directly informed I was not to harm them in any fashion, be it physical, mental or emotional - I had to let them keep it. So I stood around feeling quite nude in nothing more than my skinsuit... and barefoot.

Nothing quite like tempering one's feet on the corridors long worn smooth by the passage of a billion Elite hooves. I had discovered that the areas around the doors were smoothest, but being bare skin, that was no impediment to traction for me. However, I had long ago grown accustomed to the shielding mechanism affording me a slight slickness to my soles, and being quite well anchored where I stood was a sudden and unexpected shift for me.

I felt sluggish, without my armor to accelerate my already accelerated and augmented motions, but I could only shake my head; I was spoiled rotten by that thing, but the longer it took those pink aliens to decide to hand it back over, and the more used to being without it I became, the more it made me want it back. I know, I know... I'm a junkie.

I'd admit that much.

But I was no less addicted, and had no more desire to get clean than at any point before now. Knowing there was nothing between my skin and the air I stood in but the Kevlar fabric of my suit made me want to squirm - even without direct need of any armored outfit, without the presence of danger or combatants, I still wanted that old security standby.

It was a little unnerving, worrying about my armor when I should have been focused on the present, my here-and-now that I'd been neglecting for some time. I'd often find I had missed whole conversations, whole paragraphs of speech that was very often directed at me. To be frank, though... I had discovered I was usually in a better mood if I didn't hear their words.

Most of them had seen Humans enough to understand a basic concept about us, and the ones that knew to comment all had to comment. They all tried to tell me how terrible I looked... one of them actually made me laugh, telling me if I got any paler, I'd be transparent. Apparently the depth of their usually brown and sometimes downright black skin-tone was a point of pride for the Elite people.

But he'd been alone; the majority of those who deigned to speak to me or even about me typically commented on the hollowness of my eyes, or how I had dark circles around them... and some said I looked haunted. Others said I looked permanently furious, most of my features a little sunken and some of those showing slight bruising that was my only source of color.

Having spent nearly a week - roughly five days - out of the armor, though, I had discovered a slightly pink complexion appear on my hands. Being in the light had started to reactivate long-neglected pigment cells in my skin, and I was nolonger quite as ghost-pale as I had been. I could still see the dark purple lines where my veins showed over my knuckles, traveling over the backs of my hands to disappear into my wrists, and then reappear to spiral and web over my forearms.

Those, at least, still looked normal... for as long as I could remember, I'd always had visible veins on my hands. Though having been born to a pale-complexioned family, I doubted they would ever disappear under pigment. I might make a light tan someday, but I'd never be brown, or worse, black.

If I ever made black, chances were good I wasn't going to be tanned... I would be char.

My mind wandered some more, deviating from the planet I was looking at to my armor, then myself, heading off down the spiral path down to meet other, more interesting thoughts and ideas, but just when I'd been standing there imagining - or trying to - what John might look like nowadays, G'wi stepped over and interrupted me.

I tried hard not to jerk as though shot, but I still wound up staring at him like a deer caught in the headlights of a 'hog. When all he did was stare back at me, I finally gave up and asked; "What?" this hoping he'd be patient with me and repeat whatever it was he might have just said.

"I moved." He told me, bluntly. "That was all."

I squinted at him. "You moved... and came to a stop an arm's length from me, facing me squarely... and that was all?"

G'wi's mandibles crooked into an amused smile. On him, though, it just made it look like he was ready to bite me. "That was all."

I quirked a brow at that, but looked away, more or less content to allow the alien to behave as alien as he liked... so long as he didn't actually bite me.

"Flint."

I looked back at him, sharply, quickly, and with the same quality, I interrupted whatever thought he might have been about to offer; "Why do you call me that?"

His head drew up slightly, his expression shifting to surprise. I'd taken him aback. "What? What do you mean?"

"You call me Flint. None of the other splitlips call me that. Why?"

G'wi's expression darkened a little, and it occurred to me that I actually said it the way I'd thought it... ah, crap. One thing about the Elites... they _really_ don't like that nickname.

I cleared my throat, feeling exposed now more than ever. "Sorry..."

"I call you Flint, human," he ground out, sounding as if he were still considering whether or not to forgive me the blunder, "because I am the one to whom your life is owed. I therefore rightfully claim the honor of calling you by given name, rather than battle-earned title as capable warrior of a given House."

I pondered that. "Wait... wait... you guys gave me a House?"

"No."

For some reason, even though I had not really liked the idea of being formally adopted as some kind of pseudo-Elite-person, I felt crestfallen at his answer. Part of me cheered in relief; the rest pouted in disappointment.

"But on to more pressing matters." G'wi instructed, his tone affording that I was not going to be allowed any more silly questions for today... or at least for until his temper at me had cooled. I seceded; I didn't really think I could whip him in a fair fight anyway... not anymore. "It has come to my attention that you have not rested in as many days as have passed since you made your request to the Shipmaster."

I frowned pointedly at him; oh, but my slip was not permission for him to go where he was not welcome! "G'wi. Drop it."

He cocked his head at me. "That I have chosen to bring up the matter at all should be of note, Flint, given that I _know_ you understand my culture better than that."

I inhaled through my teeth, my tired brain trying desperately to conjure some way to ward him off; true, I understood enough about his ways and the ways of his kind to know he was really pressing this - even with just a casual mention - but he also knew enough about me and mine that I could not so easily dismiss him. I was, in effect, cornered by that. I briefly pondered shooting him... but dismissed the idea a moment later. I might need him for something more useful than blood-to-floor donation, later.

It didn't occur to me until later that he'd expressed concern for my well-being - in his own, alien way - directly after reminding me why I was still around to be concerned about at all. G'wi was incorrigibly strange, and he would likely die that way.

It wasn't like me to give up without a fight... some kind of fight... but the more I thought, the harder I spun my tired brains... the more I floundered. I just couldn't conjure anything to counter him with. Not this time. My brows met, then peaked slightly, as that feeling of utter and complete defeat began to sink in. He'd not only whipped me, he'd disarmed me, too. How unfair!

Sasaak stepped over to us, interrupting our silent staring contest. "I do not pretend to understand the manner or nature of your relations... but if you two would spare enough visual time to address the current issue." _Pay attention, idiots_. He was not hard to read. Officers were pretty much all the same.

I looked at him more to break that staring contest with G'wi than because I owed him the respect, but he seemed to nod at me in appreciation - maybe because I'd done it before his own subordinate did. That thought made me grin mentally.

"Returning scans show active swarms of the Parasite." He crossed his arms, rolling his shoulders back to jut his chest out. "They are mainly small-form and indigenous life form based, but dangerous nonetheless. However, there are vast stretches of terrain found to be completely devoid of all life, be they the Parasite or even insectoid. I will allow you one - and I stress _one_ - Phantom." His beady eyes stitched from me to G'wi suddenly. "If it is your wish to accompany the Human, you may. But you may take no more than four of your Elites."

G'wi inclined his head, apparently satisfied with the fire-team sized insertion team. I rolled that over in my head for a moment, then asked, "Any likely areas to start, Shipmaster?"

Sasaak looked back at me, then. "It seems the keel of one of your battle-ships has crumpled into the southeastern hemisphere. I would, as you might well guess, suggest you start there."

I heard his tone more than his words as he told me that - so in compliance with his obvious wish, I prodded again. "But."

"The area is quite heavily populated." Maybe he'd been fishing for a bit more than just 'but' out of me, but while I could be respectful and perhaps friendly, I wasn't really a part of his little charade and we both knew it. So on occasion I did get to squeak past a little pushiness. It sure made me feel better, knowing I wasn't trapped in the alien starch that G'wi was, given he was in the presence of superior officers. "I recommend you take heavy armament."

"I will see to it, Shipmaster." G'wi assured him.

I tossed G'wi a look. "You're coming?" I asked, more to be sure than anything else.

He gave me one of those looks. "If I do not, Flint, this may well be the last we see of each other."

I frowned. "I'm the pessimist. Don't take that from me."

He just laughed. "Come, Human, let us ready for combat." He dropped one of those odd hands of his on my shoulder and rolled me around on the unwitting balance of one heel, then gave me a push to get me started walking.

I grumbled, but I went. At least he wasn't going to confine me to quarters and make me miss out on the biggest event in SPARTAN history. As we went, I contemplated the soreness of my middle, and wondered if maybe I ought to have tried a little harder to get some more rest.

I hate Flood.

* * *

Remarkably, the pink aliens were gone when I again paid a visit to my Mjolnir. I spared a moment to inspect it, just to be sure it was everything I hoped it still was. To my satisfaction, the suit was fine, but to my pleased surprise, it had also been repaired. As I donned it bit by bit, integrating the power feed joints as I went, I found myself recalling the last time an ONI technician had put this stuff on me. That suit had been a long, long time ago, a suit I had long since trashed to fragments.

As the greaves synced with the gauntlets as the system did a self-diagnostic, I pondered what happened to ruined Mjolnir. I belted the throat seal around my head, and seated the cup onto my jaw, tucking the back in so it hugged my head. Once it was locked in place, I felt it charge, awaiting the contacts in my helmet. Taking the crown of the powered armor, I tucked it under an elbow and strode for the door. There was a residual feel of the room, and the quality of the moment, my first reintroduction to my favorite battleground item in a week, but I was too hyped to really appreciate it.

Standing on the bridge, I had been in a bit of a stupor, half distracted by G'wi's pestering. Taking the time to pull my weary carcass into the standard SPARTAN combat gear had reasserted my grounding point, however, and now I was back in my game. I felt like a SPARTAN again, felt like a soldier, ready to drop, ready for anything. If the mood persisted, I felt reasonably assured that I could complete this final op before all hell broke loose.

By that point, though... John could take up any slack I might leave.

I stepped up into the Phantom and walked the line of Elites clad in shimmery black, up to the one foremost in the depth of the bird, coming to a stop right as the enginery hummed to life and I felt the floor move.

"That armor suits you." G'wi mentioned, quietly.

I smiled. If the demons of hell came over today, I could handle it. I cast my gaze over the other Elites, noting each of their returning expressions before rolling my helmet around in my grasp. I caught it in the flat of my other hand before lifting it up to my head and seating it down. I was back in my element, the realization that I had been out of it acute at the edge of my senses. Encased inside my Mjolnir suit, I finally felt safe.

As I watched the HUD come online, the AI symbol popping up next to the motion tracker donut in the bottom left, it occurred to me that I had never thought about any of the more subtle nuances of this killer suicide mission. Behind my glossy, golden mask, I let the smile of enthusiasm and happiness fade as more grim thoughts replaced the previous ones.

If I actually found John at all, the odds of him being dead, or worse, a disfigured Flood form socializing with the other Flood forms down there, were better than any other circumstance. Cortana was long overdue for overhaul, likely rampant now from sheer age. She was, after all, holding the entire history of a long lost culture as well as much of the program surrounding their Halo array.

The girl had shot off a Halo without so much as looking twice, after all. Now, almost seven years later following that event, I was grasping at threads that there even existed the theory that she and her favorite brother of mine were still out there.

Were what I remembered of them.

I closed my eyes, unwilling to focus on the HUD anymore. That image had been the last thing the majority of my varied siblings ever saw, the stencil of situational data and battlefield imagery often fading out with their extinguished lives. Without anything any newer than a comn buoy likely dropped long before the keel had made ground fall, there was no indication that either of them were even on the ship anymore.

Or had even made ground fall with it.

_May I request a situational update, 093, or am I in communications lockdown for a reason?_

I opened my eyes again, and sighed. "What the hell. Sure. I'm dropping a suicide mission. Welcome aboard."

The AI gave a muted, amused laugh. _Alright, I'll bite. What did I do wrong?_

"You're a program." I told it. "Makes you hard to wake up when the power goes out."

This got me an audible eye-roll sound. Those always make me grin, and this time was no exception. _Please._

I offered a snerk instead. "Got a classification, or a name, or something to that effect that I could use?"

_Thor._ the AI answered. _What's the object of this suicide mission I'm being dragged along on?_

"One-one-seven."

Thor seemed to give some pause to that reply before offering a confused sounding answer to it; _Are those coordinates, or should I make some reasonable assumptions and draw some other conclusions?_

I nodded, earning a look from G'wi. "You recall Cortana."

_I recall such an artificial entity, assigned combat position with one of your brothers... you mean to imply that she - and more importantly to yourself - Spartan-117 are the object of our current mission? Are you not aware that the odds of their being alive at this date are infinitesimally small?_

"Sure." I offered. "Thought of that already. We're still going in."

Thor sighed, a resigned sound if I had ever heard one. _Fair enough. It is illogical and unsound, but an unsurprising reaction given it is between two Spartans. You were always too attached to one another._

"Morale makes up more of the fighting spirit of any given army than any other factor." I said, feeling certain I was quoting somebody... but for the life of me I couldn't recall who had said it first. Maybe it was me, and it just sounded like an old comment due to its nature.

_Might I presume your present company will be assisting in this... suicide mission?_ Thor asked.

"Yes."

Thor fell silent again, but I could still feel him thinking in the back of my helmet. Having him plugged into my suit would do that - the AI was usually an extension of the suit, and being as the suit was an extension of my augmented self, that made him, by some extension, integrated into me as much as the suit.

_I am not programmed for this sort of activity. But I will assist where and if I can._ he piped up, finishing the trailing thought he'd left with his last question. Given that he was a standard operating ONI AI, I doubted his admission of being out of his element, but I was satisfied in that he was willing to put forth the effort to try despite any claims.

"Hold onto your coding." I advised, as the sound of the Phantom's heartbeat changed. "We're here." And that said, 'here' came up to greet us like a boiling cloud of savage raptors. Everyone danced to the same gravitational pull, then they all dove for a handhold and clung to it. G'wi had to grab me, as I was standing too far from anything handy to save my own self.

"Pilot, what was that?" He demanded, right over my head. If he'd yawned right then, he would have bonked his mandibles off my helmet. I shouldered him away so we weren't so close, the initial shake proving to be the only one thus far.

From the cockpit, I heard the reply; "They appear to be firing on us, leader. I was unprepared for anti-air munitions, and have applied evasive maneuvers to bring us down."

"Damage?" G'wi pressed, almost as if he hadn't heard the last report.

"Negligible, leader. We can sustain much more before any systems critical to flight or operations are impaired."

I listened to all that with a twisted expression on my face, figuring the same could have been said in a handful of words; we've been hit, it won't happen twice. Damage is minimal. How hard was that to say? Maybe their extra eloquence was due to the fact that, for some odd reason, G'wi had chosen to ask for those updates in _English_... maybe for my benefit, maybe not, but not every splitlip out there really knew the language that well.

And the foremost sign of having poor command of a language was talking funny. I shook my head at the lot of them, though it really couldn't be helped, and stepped sideways over to my own handhold. I had been unprepared for being shaken off my balance, but I was not about to ride down to rescue John while being hugged to death by an Elite... least of all G'wi.

I didn't really have anything against the big guy, but he was still an alien, and that left him weird and strange and bizarre... and not precisely the kind of thing I wanted wrapped around me in casual embrace, either. I managed to suppress the majority of it, so none of those looking would see it, but I still shuddered... creepy!

"How far to the chosen landing area?" G'wi asked, either ignoring me or pretending to. I was happy with either, so I didn't make an issue of it.

"Momentarily, leader, we are almost there."

I couldn't help it - "Leader? Why does he keep calling you 'leader' like it was some form of retarded rank?" It came out as more of a blurt than anything else.

I got a row of bemused looks from G'wi's strike team, and one of unbiased amusement out of the guy himself. "Consider the term akin to the way your people refer to their superiors as sir."

That made me grumble. Either I was making myself look like an idiot, or I was catching myself behaving like one, but neither really made me very happy. "Never mind."

"Leader. We have arrived." The pilot called back. "Deploying gravity lift now."

Ahead of me, I saw the lights around the iris wink on, and then the petals slid back to reveal the man-sized circular hole in the floor. Through it, through the wiggling pink displacement field, I could see a couple of things I didn't really like.

First it was raining out there.

Second... it was dark.

Gods dammit. Raking the MA6C off my back and dropping the fore grip into my other hand as I strode forward, I made first drop through it, shouldering the weapon before my feet had even touched ground. I didn't see anything moving at first, so I called up the all-clear, and moved out.

G'wi didn't come down after me, though he was third out, apparently having gotten shouldered aside before he could jump first. Nobody in his party appeared to even take note of that assembly, but for some odd reason, the longer I spent with that crowd the more I took note of those little oddities.

So and so went first, when theoretically he ought not have. So and so said something, when theoretically it was a risky comment, being in bad company. So and so went to a specific location, and theoretically, he wasn't allowed to do that.

Given what I did know about G'wi and his bassackwards people, the rest of what I had yet to figure out about them made little to no sense to me. I just figured it was my attempting to see and reason through Human means that was throwing me. Either I'd get it eventually, or I wouldn't, but in the meantime, being half-ignorant kept me from being flayed alive for mistakes I didn't realized were bad.

Until G'wi pointed them out. But then, if they started trying to treat me like I was one of them, they'd likely have a whole world of hurt to answer for when the UNSC found out. HQ was not happy to learn about my new name, after all.

I wasn't supposed to be making such good friends with the splitchinned bastards who had fronted the thirty-years-war. Not allowed to kill them, but cozy was discouraged. Them having a special honorific-tagged name for me was apparently too cozy for the UNSC... or anyway, for ONI.

I didn't care one way or the other. It was better, I suppose, than the name I used for them.

_Not to interrupt, 093, but I was wondering if you ever stopped thinking long enough to actually get anything done._ Thor piped up, interrupting my thought and derailing it, too.

Mentally, I hiccupped, and had to restart just to conjure a response. "Shut up and let me work, will you?" I griped, despondent. The last thing I needed... maybe I should have left my good buddy Thor back on the mothership. ONI would have an absolute cow, but what did I care? I was on a suicide mission, after all! I was risking not only myself, some unnecessarily expended tenuous allies, but that AI I'd been sent after, too! In either situation, the program was in equally dangerous circumstances.

The only standing difference was what he got plugged into, I guess... me, or something some pink floaty thing found that his chip fit into. I would not have had my feelings hurt if Thor had a personality change.

_You must be the most demented SPARTAN that ever was. Have you even taken stock of your surroundings, yet?_ Thor complained.

"Why, got something special to point out?" I snapped back, hitting a corner of something tall, black, and semi-shiny and cutting pie around it. Empty. All empty. Really, if this place was much more than flat, bleak, and desolate in the daylight, I would be surprised. The darkness was deep, deep as in miles and miles. There simply were no features to take note of. Nothing there. As I came around the interruption in that idea, I glanced up at it, and flicked on my helmet lamps briefly to see what it was.

Oh.

Chunk of lost hull plating... probably came free during entry burn, and had stood itself into the dirt like a throwing knife on touchdown. Just when I was about to call back to the Elites following me and ask where in hell that ship aft was, I found it.

Whang!

"Forerunners, Flint! Are you blind?" G'wi exclaimed.

I staggered back, unbalanced, certain that that spot had been empty... by all rights it still looked that way. I stuck a hand out, and found a solid wall, however, proving what I had already determined with my head was indeed really there. "I hope not." I answered, feeling sheepish.

_I was not wrong._ Thor commented dryly.

"Shut up, before I yank you out, throw you down and stomp on you some for good measure!" I complained, through my teeth. I smacked my fist off the hull I'd run into once, regripped my gun, and moved along its length looking for a way in. Now I'd convinced myself it was there, I could almost see it, where the rain wasn't falling, and I could follow its warped and twisted contours without needing to run a hand along it to do so. G'wi followed me a little closer now, apparently of the mind that I needed better looking after than he'd at first thought.

How humiliating.

"Do you see a possible entrance?" he asked, alleviating some of my seething embarrassment by reinstating my position as the guy in front.

Unfortunately, I could have been anywhere in the pack and had the same answer for him. "No." I had said the word, closed my mouth, and got started thinking again when the truth of it changed on me. And suddenly, too.

Hull fell away before I could get my legs to stop running under me, but I did get my gun swiveled around in time to keep from looking like a brainless idiot. Dim, half-crusted-over lights flickered or buzzed all up and throughout the massive hole in the frigate's side, some of them bright enough to illuminate more than just their own existence. Floor grating had been swept up in curly queues to meet the ceiling, wall panels sloughed off into a large, almost ovular pool of since-cooled metal carpeting custom fitted to the churned ground beneath the broken ship.

There was nothing left that looked flammable, except perhaps some unseen electrical insulation, but aside from the massive melted-out cavity, the entrance looked good to me. "Okay, I take it back." I said, able to see the Elites gather up beside me in my peripheral. "Yes."

G'wi huffed. "Two take upper right. Two take straight. The Spartan and I will use the opening on the left. If you reach an impassable dead end, return and join the next party up. Move out."

I briefly considered asking him when he got a UNSC rank and thus authorization to order me around like that, but then shrugged it off - why not go left? What was special about any of the other options? At the least, it did give me backup that I had worked with before, and knew a smidgen about. If the shit hit the fan, I wouldn't notice until I got covered in it. Given anyone else to work with, I was usually the one that made it hit said fan.

Not my most glorious trait.

I led the way, moving first again without even realizing nobody else had started yet. G'wi fell in behind me again, apparently satisfied with keeping me where he could see me. The dim halogen lighting helped the depthless pitch I'd been running through before, but I still didn't like what I was seeing.

At first the melted, slumped corridor features had me worried that most of the ship looked this way. It seemed the deeper inside we got, the more everything looked the same. But the truth was, if that hole had been there when the ship hit atmo, the fire would have come up the halls for quite a ways, thus generating the conditions I was walking through.

But logical derivative was not exactly easily conjured out of a head like mine, so I spent most of the trip through the mess wondering when it ended. Finally, forced around bends innumerable due to restructuring, we came to the dead end G'wi had mentioned. I placed a hand on the welded door, running my gaze over the edges.

"We should move back, and look for another way." G'wi told me, impatient with my scrutiny.

But I just shook my head, and stepped back from the sealed door. Metal had been melted and splashed across its exterior, effectively welding it shut with an additional layer of steel, but getting something like steel to reshape under fire without ruining the integrity of the metal was a tenuous process; and no entry burn could generate the right forging conditions to get it right.

So back from the door, I shouldered my MA6C and put two bursts into it; one on the upper left, into the recoil gyros, one into the lower right, where the control module had been. Just as I had guessed, none of the rounds bounced, both shots blowing chunks out of the impromptu welding. A moment later, the majority of the sheath shattered, lightning cracks popping into being all over the steel weld sheath, and the door's two halves leapt apart almost a foot before stopping. The extra layer had ruffled at the lip on the walls, preventing it from opening much farther on its own.

"It's not impassible, if you know what you're doing." I mentioned, stepping forward again. I heard G'wi grunt, but he took the other side of the door from me and hauled back on it with possibly more power than I had to offer on my end. Between the two of us, though, we got the door open enough for us to slip through. He went through first, but after making the next juncture, he paused.

Catching up to him, I looked around, too. Nothing here was burnt, nothing was melted, everything still looked just the way the inside of a standard UNSC frigate ought. There was six years of dust on everything, however, and it was that feature that stopped me from just going ahead blindly looking through the place.

The dust had been disturbed in several places... scuffed tracks layered hundreds upon one another on the floor, drifts of dirt in the corners sometimes featuring a complete print. I didn't recognize any of the shapes, but I imagined G'wi might, given that the indigenous life was something his people recognized.

Flood didn't usually bother to alter the shape of the feet of their host forms... just the rest of the body. I didn't see anything that looked like boot prints, but it only occurred to me after I'd looked that the _Forward Unto Dawn_ had been emptied of personnel before that final flight that landed her keel here, and her prow in the Atlantic. There would be no formerly Human Flood-forms here. Likely, no forms I'd ever seen before. They'd just look like roughly mangled something or other with legs.

"There is another opening." G'wi voiced, the thought already acknowledged.

I let the barrel of my MA6C drop halfway. "He's not here anymore." I felt like sagging in defeat already; if the ship had already been run through a few hundred times by the Flood - moreover, if it was badly enough mangled that they couldn't just weld it shut and take it for a flight run, then there was quite obviously nothing left here. Nothing at all.

G'wi threw me a look. "Dare I disagree with you, Flint; I smell something that is not the Parasite."

That earned him a return look. "You and that nose of yours." But it did make me feel a little better; I wasn't wasting my time, chasing after rainbows and shadows that I could never catch. "What's it smell like?"

"Let us investigate, and find out." Again, he took point, so I followed him this time. We took the left up the junction in the corridor, passing the LEVEL 5 plaque on the wall. Those were in certain places, and it told me where I was; when G'wi hit a passage and paused, trying to consider which way to go, I hooked around him and headed left.

At the first sound that wasn't ours, my MA6C came up, but I passed a great length of corridor without seeing anything animate at all. Finally, fully a minute after the sound, I heard explosives go off, and taking that turn, G'wi and I came upon one of the other Elite pairs. We spared one another a look before moving on, but I didn't bother to look and see if they went their own way or fell in behind G'wi.

The ship was empty; and the way most frigates were built, no amount of grenades would make a noise significant enough to signal the Flood wandering around outside the hull. So unless some of the forms had wandered inside with us, we could throw a hoedown and nobody but us would know. Approaching the end of a bent hall, I came around to find sign of a Flood combat form losing it all over a doorway. The door itself had been ripped brutally out of the cradle and left on the floor beyond, but the claw marks etched into the metal all around the doorway was testament to the fact of what had opened it. Beyond, I found myself looking into a cryo bay.

I felt my heart stop.

"What is this place?" G'wi asked, sounding puzzled. My earlier question was answered when I saw an Elite step up next to me, and when I looked over at the guy, I knew it wasn't G'wi standing there.

"Cryogenics." I answered, feeling hollow. Turning away, I walked into the room, making a quick assessment of each pod as they came within sight. Sure as fire, I found several had been smashed, but at the far end, one stood open. _Open._ There was only one reason it would be standing open like that.

"That one looks open." One of the other Elites mentioned, pointing.

"He's not here." My mind spun as I conjured the logical progression of events. Broken free of the prow, this part of the _Dawn_ had likely come to a stop in orbit. Given nothing else to do, John would have found a working pod, and curled up in it to kill time. Cortana had likely been the one that dropped the buoy, but after crashing here, the Flood had come to investigate a possible food source. So Cortana had woke John, and now both were long gone from here.

I was too late.

_Plug me in._ Thor told me.

"What?" I asked, startled. Looking around, I found an AI port just across the way from the open pod. Of course he'd pick one close to an AI port. I reached back and yanked Thor out of my helmet, and slid his chip home into the port. With the Elites all watching, a blue figure formed out of streams of computer coding on the projection disc atop the port. Thor looked like the Norse god he was named for, clad in shiny copper armor with Gaelic runes stamped around the edges of each plate, and a relatively small hammer held perched nonchalantly against his shoulder pauldrons. Long wavy hair and a beard protruded from his bucket helmet, which was cocked just slightly back, the horns adorning it short and thick. He stood there for a moment before crossing his arms, apparently sorting through program ghosting.

"How long have you carried this around?" G'wi asked.

"Picked him up off the last ship you and I visited." I answered, not bothering to look up from the projection. It was almost a full minute before Thor finally moved. He uncrossed his arms and looked up at me, completely ignoring the Elites surrounding both of us.

"They were here." He told us. "Cortana was in this very port."

"When?" I asked, hoping for a recent date.

Thor considered my question before answering; for a program like him, his answer must have taken some serious thought. "Two years."

I cringed. "Any sign of where they went, or where they might be now?"

Thor shrugged openly. "None of the ship sensors work anymore. Nearly all systems remaining after the breakage were fried on entry. All I can tell you is that the proper system algorithms were used to thaw that pod, and the AI in this port was removed willingly from it."

I sighed, and reached down for his chip. The projection flickered, then vanished, and a moment later, the chip self-ejected far enough out for me to grab it. I restored the chip to my helmet, and turned away, conflicted. I didn't know if I wanted to fume or collapse in defeat. I had been so certain he was here - alive - and so assured of that that I'd dragged G'wi and several of his buddies along on this mission.

At least the suicide part hadn't come into play yet. Maybe we could leave without it. I had just turned to head back for the door when the Elite between me and that destination suddenly moved. In the following heartbeat, while everyone else followed suit, the first red blotch appeared behind me on my motion tracker donut. Needless to say, I moved with them.

I turned to see, bringing my rifle up, to see the biggest mass of Flood flowing out of the far end of the cryo bay towards us. The front rank was hard to distinguish until they broke away from the rest of the writhing mass, charging us with everything they had. Behind them, the ones that had raided the frigate's rear weapons locker came, waving the guns like they didn't know how to use them. The Elites all shot first, though, mowing down that front rank of weaponless Flood even as we all made for the exit by which we'd come.

I tried to aim, but in the end it was just a glorified spray and pray regardless what my intention was. We clamored at the door for a second before we got sorted and through it, as trying to run backwards through a bottleneck proved more than we were equipped to handle on the fly; when one of the Elites wound up in the back, I let myself look forward.

Right as I got turned around, my MA6C trailing my swinging gaze, I smacked the action of the gun right into the midsection of another Flood form. It was something that resembled some kind of ugly lizard-monkey thing that had once had scales. Now the extended fangs hung against its breast like limp noodles, and they swung about when I hit the thing. That Flood went down, revealing the side corridor ahead was packed with its friends. Even before the first one was fully on the floor, the next one back swung out at me, raking calcite claws across my shielding and making them sizzle in protest.

_Watch it, Spartan! You're looking out for more than just yourself, now, remember!_ Thor complained.

"Shut up!" I shot back, plowing into that attack and breaking the fragile, half-rotted thing into shreds as I brought the butt of my rifle down across its head. Juices squirted from between the broken, thinned bones, and the infection form controlling it was smashed under the collapsing body frame. Irritated more at the AI in my head than the Flood attacking me, I took it out on the nearest available.

That position cycled out too fast to be one form in particular for more than a moment, but I managed to carve myself a path with just my fists, my combat knife, and my MA6C. Somehow I managed to operate through the tangled masses without needing to fall back to reload.

As Flood forms too bizarre and too mangled to really describe poured at me, I cut them across and pounded them down, shot them full of holes and trod them under. Though I never felt anything hit me in the back, I never saw a single open spot on my motion tracker appear. If I was picking up the motion upstairs and down, though, it was going to be disorienting very soon.

As the last immediate combatant crumpled before me, and I was allowed a moment to wipe the excess goop off my rifle and look around, I realized two things. Neither made me feel any better about my situation;

First... the Flood was consolidating at the ends of the hallways.

Second... I was alone.

Slamming the next magazine of .308 home, I jacked the action bar and shouldered the rifle. Inhaling my next breath, I let some of it go in comment to opinion. Here they came.

"Oh, shit."


	3. Rescue Run

**3: RESCUE RUN**

Something exploded.

I raised my head, my senses prickling at the sound. Whatever remained that was explosive aboard, it wasn't volatile enough to detonate on its own. Moreover, there was very little chance of the Flood deciding to randomly blow the available munitions. Flood used guns easily enough, but not necessarily explosively.

Personally, I had never seen a Flood form use a grenade. The consensus on the thought was that they didn't mind bulletholes in their hosts, but being left with shredded hamburger wasn't their style.

I grabbed my BR and threw myself to my feet, landing with a sickening crunch. The floor had been a little farther away than I'd remembered, and I left a pair of imprints when I took off into a run away from my impact site. Only the sound of my own feet followed me until I heard another echoing explosion. They seemed timed, deliberate, spaced and displaced. The first had erupted somewhere near the prow slice, and the next had come a ways from it.

I put a round through the lone Flood form that appeared in my path, but I kept going. I was past it before the body hit the deck, and though the body could be taken by a new infection form, I didn't look back. That one, at least, wasn't going to tell the others about me, or come after me itself. I had been a bit more liberal with my ammunition at first, but now I had learned to be conservative. Every round counted, and I was almost out. It didn't help that the Flood had broken into the weapons locker and stripped it, expending the munitions themselves.

I typically picked my targets on who was holding a BR, nowdays, putting them down before they could pull the triggers and waste ammunition that I needed.

At the end of the corridor, I ran into the break in the port aft section, but without even drawing up, I hurtled myself across the fracture. The break had happened on impact, the metal softened too much by entry fire. Since the forward half of the frigate to plow a furrow had been the aft, all the bays had filled with concrete-like dirt, the shape digging in deeper than it could scoop away. The result had put stress on the midsection of what remained, cracking it in half again.

The opening wasn't too wide to jump across, though, and I frequently did. It certainly never stopped the Flood. As I sailed across open air, I saw several Flood forms go flowing across far below me, and I knew I had to move faster. The sound had attracted more than just me, and unlike me, the Flood were tireless.

Striking armored boot to twisted flooring, my momentum carried me ahead, and I took back into my former running stride. Silence greeted me for the next half hour as I pelted along the corridors, disorienting me. Already I could see the red gathering in my motion tracker, the un-tagged mass reading as enemy. I didn't need to be told twice, though, as any mass that large had to be Flood. Those would always be enemy, no matter if any other relation changed.

I had almost made the foremost available section when I heard the gunfire restart; I staggered as I tried to dig into the sudden turn I decided to make. I slung a hand out and caught the wall, pulling towards the corner as I pedaled harder. A gunfight meant just one thing. Drawing closer, I heard more.

_Bang bang bang BLAMBLAMBLAM bang bang!_ A battle-rifle! It was a different caliber than I recognized, and every time it fired, it would overlay the smaller arms the Flood had stolen. That meant one thing; Humans!

Then, _Phzzip whap whap whap whap whap-phzzip!_. My mind hesitated as I tried to place that sound. It was a gun, I knew, but until I came around that final corner and plowed into a solid mass of writhing Flood forms, I couldn't recall what kind.

Plasma splashed across all of us at once, knocking me down and boiling most of them away. I socked the big one off of me and rolled back to my feet, twisting to shoot the forms coming up the side corridor. Ahead, in the gasp of open space between us, I saw figures I never thought I'd ever see again.

_Elites!_ There were two of them, clad in Spec-Ops black, slicing an effective swath down and cutting a path out of the cryogenics bay. I supposed they had gone to that spot because they'd been looking for me.

I didn't get to think about it for very long at all, however, when a third Elite slung around the far corner behind the first two I'd seen, shouldered between them, and charged right at me. The look on his scar-thatched face made me balk, catching me off my balance for a moment as I doubted my first idea that they were here for friendly reasons.

As he neared my position, the angry snap of an energy sword popped to life at his left – southpaw Elites were actually as rare as southpaw Humans. Oddly, it reminded me of the only lefthanded Spartan. The then-whole Covenant had caught up to him years ago, though, and according to the intel I had been given, he was the only Spartan to ever stay in the KIA section.

They'd broadcasted on open channels what they'd done to him, leaving it without question that he was dead. The Elite was upon me before I could back away, proving yet again that they were faster on their feet than any Human – augmented or not – could ever hope to be. Rather than stabbing me through, like I'd at first thought, he grabbed me around my gunarm and slung me forward.

A Flood form I had missed behind me bought it in two pieces, and as I was propelled forward, the other Elites gathered behind the one that had me. There were three of them that I could see, leading me to wonder just how many had come down to look for me.

In a way, it was touching… but equally as frightening.

I gathered my own feet beneath me as we made the next juncture, but even when the Flood poured in like a gushing water tide, the Elites just burned them away and ran through anyway.

"There is nothing here, Flint, we are leaving." One of the Elites told me.

Most of what he said didn't fully register under the heavy combat conditions, my own weapon bleeding bullets as fast as theirs were. Blades snapped to life whenever a form got too close to shoot off, but the methods bought us a path all the way out of the _Dawn_. And once out, I followed their quick retreat down a path I recognized as recent.

I'd been out here the day before, and those tracks had not been there. With the rain letting up, and the sun peeking over the horizon, everything looked stark and plain. I could see the line of tracks made in a loop around one of the lost sections of freestanding hull, leading over and up to a spot where they just stopped… but anyone could have guessed why.

The all too familiar pounding hum of a deep green Phantom met me as I was led out away from the dead frigate. The bird circled over the _Dawn_, and came about to meet us on the ground. Once it had come to a stop, the gravity lift snapped on, and the forward Elite stepped straight in.

I felt slightly apprehensive about this arrangement – why hadn't the UNSC come for me? Why Elites? Why in a Phantom? What was going on? I half-turned back to look over my shoulder, but the Flood we hadn't killed had come out after us, determined not to let us get away. There would be, I supposed, time to consider the circumstances of my departure later. Right now… I could be satisfied with the fact that I wouldn't be in the company of Flood anymore.

Elites, I had learned, could at least be reasoned with. I stepped into the beam, and felt my feet leave the ground. Watching as the interior of the Phantom closed around me for the first time in several years felt oddly nostalgic, but all the same, it was a good feeling. I was going home… home, where there were no Flood.

Half of Africa had been glassed to be sure of that fact.

I stepped away from the closing iris in the floor, and took in my unlikely rescue team. Five Elites, all clad in Spec-Ops black. Most of them were looking at me, but one in particular kept getting my attention; the expression on that scar-thatched face seemed more intensive than the others. There might be a casual observer in the Phantom with me, but this guy wasn't him.

Stepping across the gap between us, he raised his head slightly, as if examining me. I resisted the urge to duck instinctively when he raised an arm, but I still gave a visible flinch that paused his motion.

He cocked his head at me, scrutinizing. "You have…" he finished reaching for me, then, "accumulated something on your armor." And he peeled away a stripe of Flood-flesh some eighteen inches long off my shoulder.

I gave it an interested look. Why would that have bothered him? Everyone present was covered in the sloppy goop that splashed out of a Flood when it was shot to bits. But when he offered it to me, I did take it from him, and look at it.

"I trust the AI is intact?"

My head jerked up, and my expression wrinkled. They'd told this bunch about Cortana? "…yes." Intact, sure. Operational? Not quite. She needed new hardware.

He nodded, apparently satisfied with just the simple answer. He was proving a very peculiar Elite. Turning partly away, he made a strange throaty noise. I wasn't sure if it was some kind of communicatory noise or not, but directly after, one of the other Elites snapped his mandibles together almost as if in reply. To that one's left, the next one up chortled something out that I didn't understand.

Whatever he'd said, it made the one next to me turn back to me and look me in the face. "You seem uncharacteristically quiet, Flint."

Memory clicked. That was the second time he'd called me that.

"It is unfortunate that we were unable to find your brother, but it is unlikely he even owns remains safe to claim at this time."

I gave a mental hiccup. My _what_??

The Elite wiped his palms together, smearing Flood goo. "You can say you tried, Flint. Given the worst of circumstances, there is no shame in failure."

"I don't understand." I added, finally. "Why do you keep calling me that?"

This earned me a look. "We have already had that discussion, Flint." He sounded slightly annoyed.

I was about to respond when my HUD glitched sideways on me. The only way to fix that was to take the helmet off and twist the calibration systems. My suit needed a tune-up, but I didn't have the equipment. I sighed. "I don't remember it."

The look I'd gotten turned interested. "Be as it may not the first time your memory has failed you, Flint, this recurring frequency is becoming alarming."

That got my attention. "I have to admit, I don't have a clue what you're talking about… or who you think you're referring to." When my HUD did the binary smear, completely obliterating my ability to see out through the visor, I had no choice, and I had to start hitting seal catches.

I got the helmet lifted off, and had turned it upside down to look inside, but my gaze was dragged back up when everyone in the bird jerked back from me as if in shock.

"Forerunners!" The one I'd been talking to exclaimed.

My eyebrows met, the apprehension from earlier creeping back to me. The Elite I'd spoken with abruptly came forward and caught me by my shoulder, scowling at me the way the ones I'd killed on the first Halo always had. "Where is Flint? Where did you come from?"

I spluttered, taken completely off guard. "Flint… wait…" I paused to run that through memory. Sam, Linda, Kelly, Kurt… Flint. _Oh, damn._ I smacked his hand off my arm, and braced back in place. "You mean you brought a Spartan _with you_, and you _lost him_ back there??"

Instead of answering, he turned away from me, stalking to the front of the bird. "Turn us around!"

"Leader?" Came the confused response.

"You heard me, honorless cur! _TURN US AROUND!_" Everyone grabbed for a handhold on the walls when the Phantom nosed into a gee-force turn, the insult apparently setting the pilot to fuming. The Elite in the doorway spun on a hoof to face me again. "It would seem I was wrong."

I studied him for a moment, trying to figure him out. "About what?"

"When I said there was nothing down there to reclaim." He began to reclose the gap between us, slower than before. I backed away despite myself, my helmet still in my hands. "I should have known you were not Flint, when you failed to react as he does, when your weapon appeared different than what he carried on insertion."

I tried not to actually frown at him. "Flint. You called me Flint. You mean 093?"

I got a nod.

"He's dead. The whole galaxy watched him die."

That earned me an evil looking smile that I found I didn't like at all. "I was there, Human, I stood at the side and I watched them kill him. I took him down from the cuffs and I carried him to the Mausoleum, and I was there when Anuna thawed him out. I followed him through what is now history, the most glorious moment in your people's living minds. I watched from his side as you chased the Prophet of Truth across the second Halo array, watched as he chose to sacrifice himself to clear your path for you, drawing out the Flood that would have stopped you from your goal. I was there when they brought him down, was there when your people reclaimed him… weak, broken, a whisper of the honorable warrior I had come to know. And I was there when he made the decision to chase you down, six years after everyone else gave up on you and declared you dead to them. I will not leave him to die, not down there, not like this." He raised a hand, and stabbed a sharp-ended finger at me. "And if you are half what he thinks of you, you won't, either."

Quietly, I answered, "I don't intend to." I stuck my thumb down into the calibration ports in my helmet, and twisted it. I'd done it a hundred times, but it was always a guessing game. When I dropped it back over my head, though, I found I'd gotten it right on the first try. The readout looked solid, and the HUD was stable and bright again. Good. I sealed it in place, latching it down so it would stay. I had a mission to accomplish, now… and I needed to be able to see what I was doing.

"Leader. The Flood are amassing around the fallen Human ship. The only open area is atop the hull." The pilot called back.

"Then drop us there." The Elite in front of me snapped, without taking his eyes off of me. It was strange, seeing one of his kind so devoted to one of mine. But I could work with that; if one of my Spartans was down there, I was going in to get him out. If I had backup both willing and capable, that was better still.

As soon as the lift iris in the floor opened, I was the first through it.

My Mjolnir-clad feet slammed into the outer hull, and instantly I broke into a run. I knew exactly where to go to get down into the interior, as I had been over the whole terrain many dozens of times over. Behind me, I could hear the Elites pounding in pursuit. Having them there was a mild comfort. Knowing my back wasn't open for whatever wanted to take a swipe at it was a comfort, too. It had been too long since I'd worked with a team.

I missed it.

I let my momentum carry me down into the fracture, and I struck the floor inside the upper cusp of the break tucked into a roll. Before I stopped, I stood back up out of the roll, and began to run anew. Following the sounds I could hear, I knew I was already getting close.

Ahead, through the endless tangle of corridors, there resonated the screaming and gurgling of hunting, attacking Flood forms, and overlaying that was the staccato beating of BR rounds rattling off.

At first I thought I was hearing all of it, until I heard Flint shoot back.

_Crack crack crack pow pow pow BLAMBLAMBLAM crack crack pow pow pow BLAMBLAMBLAM!_ I had never heard that sound inside the frigate before today, and by its difference I knew it was a bigger caliber than I held. Bigger than standard issue, though smaller than a fifty. Each time Flint fired, it would deafen everything else. I didn't doubt he was flattening whatever he was shooting at.

As I grew closer, I tried to distinguish what it was by how it sounded, but I couldn't quite place the caliber. Running into the back end of the Flood going after him, I raised my BR and belted out everything in the magazine. Around my head and shoulders came a rain of searing plasma, cutting back and boiling away whatever I missed or didn't have ammunition for.

I reloaded on the run, slamming a few forms aside with my fists as I ran through their number. Raising the barrel again, I took aim at the wriggling mass trying to all fit through a crowded door at once, and blew them to bits. Behind me I could hear the telling sizzle of Elite swords in use. Ahead, I heard Flint fire off again… and even though it was subtle, muted, quiet even, even though everything else was screaming and shooting and going on at the top of its lungs, I heard the ominous click of an empty clip.

_No!_ I depressed the trigger at the next target and didn't let it go, burrowing a path through the tangling masses of Flood with more urgency. Flint didn't have backup. I'd stolen it from him. Flint didn't know the lay of the ship, either, and he was more liable to run himself into more Flood than find somewhere to get clear of them.

I felt I was almost there, when the Flood ahead of me suddenly erupted in flame and shrapnel rather spectacularly. The press of detonation flattened them and knocked me back, but despite how it hurt, it was also heartening. They hadn't gotten their kill, not if he was throwing explosives. Unfortunately, the more Flood I killed or hacked away, the more could fit in past me. And even though it seemed I was on top of Flint… when I finally got through to where I thought for sure he was, I didn't see anything.

Not even any expended shells on the floor.

Seeing me pause, the Elites behind me drew up. "Where is he?" One asked, over the din of constant battle.

"I don't know…" I answered, puzzled. Then I heard the rifle discharge again, and I figured it out. I turned away from the blasted-out room I'd been led to, and stopped in the corridor outside. Sure enough, there was a fracture in the flooring, and through it, I could see zipping bullets and shredding Flood bits. "He's below us!" I said, catching the attention of the Elites again.

I knew a way down – but it wasn't close. And while the Flood forms were small enough to squeeze through the fracture in the floor, and a grenade certainly was, I and my new companions were not. We had to hurry. A fresh surge of Flood reached for me right as I reached for them, stalling out my charging momentum. I drew my BR back out of the mass, pointed it into it, and pulled the trigger.

To my left, I saw a halo of sharp, hot brightness making an arc downward through the masses. It loosened up the press, and gave me the room I needed to finish plowing. I hadn't intended to fully expend my ammunition, but when I reached for another magazine, I found I was dry.

I cursed, realizing I'd lost focus on that commodity when we'd turned around to come back after Flint. I still found it amazing he was still alive – it had to be some kind of record, being the only man to ever survive public execution.

The Elite to my right tossed me a Carbine, so I let the BR fall away. Without ammunition, it was pretty useless. With my new backup, I was able to get through the collecting masses faster than had I been by myself – though had I really been by myself, I doubted I would have tried to go through that way at all.

The Elites were good at plowing, I had to admit. Did they often drop with Flint? Did he give them that kind of experience to get good at it? If there was enough Flood left in the universe to make that a common practice, though… that was a scary thought. Not for the first time I wished Cortana still worked, and could give me input on my thoughts.

Right as I reached the ladderwell that would take me down to Flint's level, I heard the bigger rifle stop firing again. I felt my brain freeze up as I slung myself down the ladder, kicking open the hatchway into the corridor below, every fiber of my being leaning towards the need to hear that gun shoot again.

Ominous silence ticked on and on as I pounded up the corridor, trying desperately to make up lost distance in a hurry. The Elites got caught up almost before I'd left them behind, and now they knew where we were going, two of them even got ahead of me. When we reached Flood again, most of them were already dead and down. Loose, fragile infection forms swarmed over the bodies, ignoring most of them. The Elite to my right spared several dozen rounds to smash the infection forms, but by virtue of our speed we left most of them alive behind us.

"Come on, shoot back!" I cried, finally, unable to bear the lack of that sound anylonger. More ominous than the lack of Flint's rifle discharge was the slowly lessening sound of the other guns… coming up to the final stretch of corridor, we ran into an idle Flood form.

Holding a magnum, the form just stood there, the gun pointed at the floor, its back to us. I brought the butt of the carbine down on its shoulders, shattering them and breaking the infection inside the chest cavity without even slowing down.

Flood rose up en masse to meet us at the intrusion, stopping our advance. There was no meeting them this time, as return fire met ours and drove us back around the corner under threat of being minced. I found myself shoulder to the corner, so the Elite next to me up away from the corner grabbed me to get my attention.

When I looked back at him, he handed me a grenade.

Taking it, I charged the plasma fusion coils, and once it was glowing sharply, I flung it as hard as I could off the far wall of the corner. The grenade bounced hard enough that it struck the opposite wall and bounced off of that too once before it lost enough momentum to keep sailing.

A heartbeat after it came to rest, it detonated, shredding the occupants clustered around it in the corridor. Following the settling aftermath of the blast, I curled around the corner, and charged straight in. The Elites followed me without hesitation, evidently of a mind to use the same element I was; even Flood would get disoriented by being blasted with concussive forces, even if all their friends had taken the destructive values away from them.

Indeed, the corridor was slicked over with a thick layer of drooling slime now, all that remained of the formerly gun-wielding forms from before. Still, there was no sign or sound that Flint was still in the fight. As far as I could tell, the only thing the Flood were still shooting at was us. Just us.

Surely I wasn't that unlucky…

Finally, at the far end of the corridor, as the last of the Flood forms expended under my companions' and my fire, I saw something green that wasn't olive colored. I came around the corner to bring the rest of him into view, my breath held in the moment before I saw him, unsure if he would even still be in one piece; I had seen Flood rip people apart before, especially if they proved a particular hazard to the Flood population.

But he proved whole, and I let myself breathe at the realization. But he'd crumpled against the wall, the most savage-looking battle rifle I'd ever seen laying across one open hand. As the Elites circled around us, I dropped to my knees, and grabbed his helmet, desperate to know he lived.

He jerked in my grasp, emitting a strained, liquid gasp. Over his shoulder, under my right hand, I saw why; curling him forward in my grasp, I raked the Flood form off the back of his shoulder and smashed it on the floor under that fist.

Lines of distressed electric point energy crawled across his filthy combat skin, but even after several seconds, they were not replaced with an active shield wall. That was bad. I let him lean back on the wall for a moment, trying to see through his golden visor. He raised a hand, and draped it over my elbow, the weight of that arm resting fully against his grasp.

"Get out of here, sir." He wheezed.

Elation rippled through me. I knew that voice. It really was Flint! "Not without you." Stubborn, pessimistic as always. He never changed.

"You have to leave me." He protested, weakly, trying to push me away. It didn't take much to fight him, though.

"Not going to happen, soldier." I took one of his arms, and pulled it over my shoulder before standing both of us up. He sagged in my grasp, but when I adjusted to hold him anyway, my fingers found a deep crack in what should have been a solid Mjolnir plate.

Damn… they'd beaten him half to death. "Come on, let's get moving." I told the Elites, beginning to pull back the way we'd come. As I took the first couple of strides, I wondered why the arm I had pulled across my shoulders felt like it wasn't attached to the Spartan it belonged to…

I didn't get far, before the Elite from before grabbed him from me, shifting him to my other side, where he felt solid. "Other arm, human. Not that one." He told me.

I was puzzled by that, but left it as was; at least now it didn't feel like I was going to drop him, and be left holding his arm while the rest of him hit the floor. That had been a particularly disturbing feeling.

"You falling apart on me, in there, Flint?" I asked, starting forward again. The Flood coming for us looked thinner in number now, but the Elites formed a solid shield around us, so they stayed at a distance.

He didn't really answer, though I suspected the silence was unnatural. If he had the exterior comn turned off, I figured I couldn't blame him for not wanting to share all he had to be going through right now, but all the same, it irked me to not know what he was thinking.

I had missed, after all, one of the most amazing mission reports of all time, according to the Elites. And he'd been right at the center of it. But according to that same report – as sketchy a version as I had gotten of it – seemed to paint him as the biggest Flood-magnet that ever lived.

I knew how much it hurt to have an infection form try to drill through the back of my head, as I'd had it happen before, back aboard the _Pillar of Autumn_, when I'd come back to it to blow up the reactors and destroy the Halo. Cortana had saved my skin then – it didn't look like Flint had been that lucky. Getting back out proved a longer and more arduous haul than getting in had been, with the press being on us this time. Having gone in and stolen away with their prize might have had something to do with it, but I was not about to let them have it back just to facilitate our escape.

Inside of the same ten minutes we took to make it to the stress fracture where I'd gotten us in, Flint went from minorly limp to completely unresponsive on me. I wasn't about to let go of him, though, not without knowing he was really dead. If he wasn't really dead, I wasn't going to leave him behind.

Images of what had happened to Grace filled my head, and a need to prevent those events from repeating welled up in response. _No more of my Spartans._ I was already peeved at this batch of Flood for smashing Cortana for me. With the realization that they had tried to steal Flint's Humanity… I was vaguely less than furious.

Dragging him more than holding him up, now, my progress was even more slowed, but when we reached the fracture, it all came to a stop. Looking up, I pondered what I saw. From where I stood, almost three levels from the top, all I could see of the hull – or the skyline up there, for that matter – was fire. Tall, leaping flames shot from the hull's surface, the occasional flaming droplet splattering down into the broken fracture. If the Flood had poured some kind of fuel over the hull and then set it on fire to prevent our escaping by that method, they were probably not thinking straight.

I could run through fire without breaking a sweat – and if our ride was prompt, so too could my unmasked companions. I lowered Flint to the floor, and propped him against the wall. Then I looked over at the nearest Elite to me, and asked, "Did any of you happen to bring rappel hooks?"

The query earned me an odd look, but no real answer. Dissatisfied with that, I looked to the next one up.

"What about you?"

The one with the scarred face finally turned to me, then, snapping his mandibles in the same way the Arbiter had done, after I'd let the magnum out from between them. The memory was an odd one, to surface at a time like this. "Where is Flint?" he asked, rather than answering my question.

I balked. "What? What do you mean? He's…" I turned back, but sure enough, my fellow Spartan was gone. Oh, no. At first I groped at open air, unable to wrap my mind around the empty place where I'd set him down just a moment ago, but then I stepped up to the actual edge and looked down over it.

The bottom was a lot closer than it would have been, had the _Dawn_ made a gentler landing, but sure enough, spread across the hump of plowed dirt the ship had carved out of the ground, was the missing party. Briefly I pondered how he could have gotten down there, then I realized that he must have somehow pulled himself over the edge; was it some last effort to keep me from bringing him home with me? Or was there something else he was up to, and hadn't communicated before he'd jumped? I knew I hadn't set him that close to have just fallen over without some form of prompting. There was no way he'd just accidentally made that drop.

The scarred Elite stepped up next to me, and looked down, too. "Such a fall would surely have killed him." For some reason, it sounded bizarre to me, hearing the splitlip expressing concern over that observation.

I reached up to my helmet, and flicked on the comn. "093, please respond."

At first, static washed the channel, but the LOS comnline didn't need a third point of contact to connect me with another Spartan. All I needed was to be looking at them.

"Can you hear me?"

Finally, I got a telling click; he'd turned it on. The first thing I heard wasn't pretty, though, and I cringed as I listened to him breathe. "Leave me behind, Master Chief, there's nothing you can do for me now."

For a moment, I closed my eyes, trying not to imagine what he was feeling. "You know that's not going to happen."

He offered one of the most painful sounding laughs I'd ever heard. "You can't save me, sir."

"That won't stop me from trying anyway." I informed him. "Stay put. I'm coming down after you." I was about to leave it at that, when I decided to add, "And if you try to run away again, next time I catch up to you I'll have to think of something mean to do to you for it."

He chuckled at that thought, but the sentiment set him to coughing; I had to turn him off to keep from gagging on my own tongue… he sounded bad, worse than bad. I figured if I didn't get him to some kind of medical facility very soon, he'd die enroute on me, and then I would be the last Spartan yet again.

I didn't like that thought.

So, I jumped.

"Wait!"

* * *

I landed with more of a splash than I had thought I would, but the fall had been a pretty lengthy one. It made me wonder if Flint hadn't only just landed by the time I realized I needed to look over the edge to see him. Above me, the Elites had begun to stagger-leap between the cracked halves of the ship to make the distance, but while swift, the practice was slowing their descent.

I pulled myself back to my feet, shook the stars out of my head, and waded out of the pool the last rain had left. I'd emptied most of it, but it had been a deep enough hollow that water remained in the bottom even as it ran back to itself from the edges.

Slogging through the sticky mud up the small hump towards the small crater where Flint had landed, I felt heavier with each stride. Reaching him, I sank myself into the mud nearly eight whole inches just prying him out of it. Trying to yank my legs free proved more of a task than I was up to, and I began to think I had truly gotten myself stuck this time.

Now what?

Curling my arms around Flint, I hauled on my left leg one more time, but it was held firmly indeed. "Ugh. Look what you've done."

He didn't answer, still hiding behind the environmental seal his Mjolnir afforded him. I imagined if we'd been Marines, he wouldn't be so quiet. The good part was he wasn't fighting me anymore, though I wondered if he was being compliant or just limp. Dependant on which it was, I knew, depended on the real severity of his actual condition. Though sounding like one was drowning on some kind of internal injury was never good.

Finally, the first of the Elites made it down, and trotted towards us. He braced his hooves on either side of me, hooked his hands under my armpits, and hauled me right out of the sucking mud with a thunderous pop. I had clung stubbornly to Flint the whole while, so when I came loose, we both were free.

I hauled him away from the sloppy crater he'd punched in the mud, but I had worn myself out fighting with it, and there I plopped down, and just sat there for a while, trying to gather my breath.

"What's that gun you were carrying, anyway?" I asked, almost casually. I knew I was losing him; but if I could just get him to try, it would greater our odds of getting all of us out of here alive.

I hadn't survived this long just to die on the day of my rescue.

He dragged a hand across his chest, until he reached mine, and patted them. I laughed.

"Sounds nice, I liked it." I added, tasting my lips. "What caliber is it?" Never mind I'd left it behind when I'd grabbed him off the floor back in the _Dawn_. Looking up, though, I realized there was a black stock sticking up off the shoulder of the Elite that had freed us.

So it wasn't still up in the ship.

"Wish I had one." I told Flint, wishing he'd just say something back. Usually, I was the quiet one. Right now, quiet was the last thing I wanted him to be, though. It was disheartening to know that despite all my prompting, he was still keeping his external comn off.

"We must move." The Elite said, interrupting me. "The Parasite will arrive soon."

I sighed, disappointed, but nodded; he was right. It took some effort, but I managed to get us both back upright. Flint did try, this time, though he still behaved as if nearly half of his body was under paralysis or something similar to it.

Hearing something like a collection of severed bodyparts slapping into a heap behind me, I turned my head to see. Four of the Elites darted away, but one got buried under the cascade of infection forms; the hammering of their fall knocked the alien from his feet, but though he scrambled to get away, several that hadn't exploded on impact leapt on him, and began peeling away his armor.

I didn't even consider helping; I just twisted under Flint, pulling him as far up as I could, and took off at my best speed away from the Flood. The Elite sent up a squall unlike any sound I had ever before heard, but though it was soon silenced under a barrage of plasma fire and carbine rounds, I knew that those little white things were never far from their larger companions.

The Flood were not on their way; they were already here.

Flint managed every other step, apparently as unwilling as I to become Flood food, even as much as he felt unlikely to survive. I had known it was there, but when the water-cut cliff-like drop appeared, I was unprepared for it. Fifteen feet down, a small river ran, fed mainly by runoff from the upper hull of the _Dawn_. It was sloppy down there, but all the water that was going to run through the area already had, and was gone. Without footing where I had expected it to be, I hit the drop badly and drove to my knees in the muck at the bottom. The Elites all sailed over us, jumping the expanse cleanly even as I had to get back out of the mud for the second time.

Somewhere, Flint found the strength to grant me the last little push I needed to get all the way free, and I came out of the mud without him. I had just grabbed ahold of him and dragged him out after me when the first of the Flood crested the muddy cliff above us. With one hand clamped around his wrist, I slung my other over my shoulder for the carbine I'd been lent. I got the weapon aimed, and the first shot off, before the Flood form taking the rounds got close enough to slap it out of my hand.

Right as I thought we'd be swarmed, bullets erupted out of its top, and following the conclusion of its odd jig, it dropped away. I looked down, to see Flint had gotten a standard SMG from somewhere. I took it when his aim wavered, and getting a better grip on the back of his shield engine unit, I started moving us again.

Every time the pursuing Flood got too close, I burned their features off with Flint's SMG. The one time their mass got too thick for the one weapon to manage, I saw him pull a grenade out of his equipment, struggle with the pin for a moment, then let it roll free as I dragged him along.

We got out of the effective lethal range before it erupted, right under the unsuspecting Flood. When I ran out of ammo for the first magazine, Flint handed me another. At almost the exact moment I finished installing it in the gun, the Elites reappeared, and the scarred one flung that savage battle rifle at us.

Dropping the SMG back into Flint's grasp, I stuck my arm out and caught the flying weapon. I seated it one handed against my shoulder, and tried the trigger, hoping it still had ammunition in the magazine. Thunder erupted from the barrel as my shoulder spun back away from the recoil, and the three-round burst spat wild, pegging three different Flood forms.

Flint looked up at me after that, two fingers on his visor.

I wanted to smack him.

Now I was familiar with the gun, I could hit what I aimed at, and nothing I shot ever got back up again. Flood poured out of the fracture in the frigate we were leaving behind like their name suggested, until I was sure they had gathered the population of the entire planet's ecosystem here today to come after us with.

The Elites had spread out to my flanks, keeping them from catching up and keeping them from coming around us, but when the one unfortunate member of their number reappeared through the ranks of Flood, I knew I was in trouble.

Active shielding repelled my new gun's bullets, and though I'd only had a single three round burst left by then, it still alarmed me to know. The twisted Elite was a familiar shape, one I had grown to know and understand back on the Halo arrays… even on the Ark. Even as I put more torque behind hauling Flint away, I saw him roll out every spare grenade he had left on that guy. That didn't comfort me much, either.

One by one, the grenades erupted, blowing pudding through the ranks of small-form Flood, but the former Elite Flood form just flipped end for end once, dropped back once, tumbled away once… and kept coming. I wanted more ammunition for Flint's rifle, but I couldn't reload the thing one handed, and I was not about to let go of Flint with that thing coming after us.

It was faster than all its brethren, and it knew just who it wanted most.

I dropped Flint's rifle into his arms, and I saw him let go of the SMG to catch it. His motions looked sluggish and clumsy as he fumbled a fresh mag for the thing, but I dared not stop running. Dragging him through the sloppy mud was killing me, leaving me feeling worn and breathless, and the Elites were getting more and more spread out. I didn't see their Phantom anywhere, to boot. Finally, after completely losing one full magazine to the trail we were leaving, Flint got another one loaded, and a round chambered.

I saw him try to shoulder the thing, try to aim it, but he was acting as if it weighed more than his armor did; try as he might, he couldn't get the barrel up. Finally, the Elite caught up, and I had to let go to meet the threat. Weaponless for the moment, I met the Flood form with both fists, braced against meeting its running momentum. It knocked me over anyway, and sent both of us tumbling as we traded blows. I wound up on bottom, but just as it rose up, the long, sparkling calcite claws poised to tear my Mjolnir right off of me, I heard that beautiful sound again;

_BLAMBLAMBLAM!_ The Elite Flood form didn't just fall over – it vanished off the top of me, and when I looked, I found it in a still, tangled heap off to my side. It looked dead. Looking the other way, I saw Flint.

He lay on his back, strung out away from me, his arms over his head, the scope of his remarkable rifle resting in the mud, and the barrel pointed right at me. He'd found a way to aim it anyway, just like a Spartan would. His head was turned around so it looked like his neck was broken, but I'd had to turn my head like that once myself, and I knew it wasn't… he was looking at me. Briefly I pondered what I saw; it was unusual for him, to say the least, to be firing a rifle as if he were righthanded like myself. The butt was on the wrong shoulder. Why escaped me, but I had more pressing matters to think about.

As I picked myself up to come get him again, he dropped his trigger hand from the gun to put two fingers on his visor.

That time, I returned the gesture, before scooping him up out of the mud. Right as I did, the Elites turned back up – funny how that lot had a habit of vanishing and reappearing like that – and a moment later, my feet left the ground as I was swept up in a pulsing violet beam. I hugged Flint tightly to make sure he wasn't left behind again, but halfway up the beam, I saw the rifle float free of his hands.

* * *

MA6C. Upgraded, augmented, loaded hot. It was also bigger than I remembered the MA series being. Like it was a gun designed special for a man who was four feet across the shoulders, and seven feet tall. It felt like it matched my grasp, and I found I liked it. I wondered if it was custom, or if I could get my own once we got back to UNSC space, but the majority of my mental focus was spent wondering things about my fellow Spartan.

Flint looked pretty good, for everything he'd been through, save for one defining feature. Being pale as a ghost was a feature of being inside the Mjolnir all the time. I looked like that. But being a sickly shade of green, rather than peach or pink – given that our blood ought to have been red – was not a good sign at all.

Prying him out of his broken armor had proved a chore even when the pink aliens floating on gas bags with long, trailing tentacles got to him. I stood back from them with the scarred Elite, watching as they struggled to get the seized pieces loose. They looked like fragile beings, but I felt almost disinclined to ask what they were, what they did, why they were found aboard an Elite Cruiser.

When the helmet finally came loose, I knew I was looking at something much worse than just green skin – where a civilian man would have had a beard, Flint had blood. The stuff drooled from the lip of his helmet even as the Engineers set it aside, leaving long, ugly, dark streaks down the side of the table they'd set it on. As the bigger pieces came loose one by one, I drew closer. I'd seen a billion different ways one could be afflicted, but this was a new one. I'd seen men go from healthy one moment to disfigured by Flood the next; but this was new, even for me.

Despite being green in pallor, and beaten half to death with lacerations and bruising, Flint looked no less Human than the last time I'd seen him. He'd been much younger then.

So had I.

Wearing everything except my own helmet, I stood over him, looking down at him, wondering if he was even still alive. He'd come for me – according to all the Elites aboard the ship had to say, he'd done it despite everything everyone else had said or decided. Looking down from his face, I ran my eyes over the extent of the rest of him; tucked just under his ribs on the left, there was a long gash in the skinsuit where the armor had not been damaged, but the long, matching line in his skin told me why it was there. At some point between his last visit to UNSC space and now, at some point without his armor, he'd been stabbed in the guts.

Why? The massive shadow of the scarred Elite circling me lifted my gaze, and I cast him a look as I debated the nature of my newest circumstances.

"You do not seem everything they said about you, now that you are realized in the flesh." The Elite mentioned, quietly.

"Heroes are like that." I answered, just as quietly.

"The AI had told us you were out of stasis on that world for the prior two years." He seemed to scrutinize me, as if seeking some flaw in that line of reasoning.

I just nodded. I spread my gloved hand in the air over the older – but yet recent – injury on my fellow Spartan. "Who stabbed him?"

The Elite's eyes flicked down, as I lifted my hand away again, then returned to my face. "He did."

I cocked a brow, doubtful of that.

"For the same reason I had you carry him differently than you planned to, Human." The explanation sounded almost defensive; but not defensive of himself. More defensive of Flint. There was something left out of the story, and I suspected that if Flint died, the Elite would take it to his grave. But the manner of the words gave me food for thought.

"Why would he stab himself?"

"Never by intent." The Elite looked Flint up and down once, then back at me. "He is not… entirely unaffected by the toils of war."

That told me nothing and everything at once. Through interpretation, I figured he meant that there was some kind of old battle-injury that had somehow altered the way Flint fought in more recent battles. The kind that would make him stab himself… by accident. Through Mjolnir, though? I looked back down, trying to gauge the injury. Energy sword… had to be. The backside of one.

"You said you were there." I offered, trying to piece everything together. "Why would he try to make me leave him behind?"

The Elite gave what sounded like a soft laugh. "Perhaps he has been among my kind for too long. My understanding of the manner would not match Human custom."

I looked back up, at him. "What do you mean?"

"Warriors fallen on the field would be greatly dishonored to be taken from it; and while not precisely fallen when you found him, it seemed his belief that he qualified."

I frowned briefly at him, and looked back down. "What can you do for him, here?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shake his head. "Not that much, I fear. Our medical facilities are not designed to handle your kind."

I nodded, once, the motion slight as it were. Made obvious by manner, and through the eyes of those who had brought him to me, I now understood how little of the old Flint remained. Pessimistic, yes, luckless, yes. But the rest of him had gone, replaced with something I realized was very alien to me. Never before had I realized one of my own Spartans to be so very different from the rest – from myself.

Mendez would have swallowed his tongue if he could see us now.

The scar-thatched Elite eventually wandered on, but I remained where I was. I had spent much of my time isolated on the world savoring the memory of little things; a sealed MRE, the smell of too many Marines in one forward base camp, the sound of another Human voice other than my own… and when she had been smashed in a fight with the Flood, the sound of Cortana's.

I knew she was still salvageable, because the damage had been mainly to the port, and not so much to her chip. Having my head cracked against the bulkheads had turned my world topsy-turvy for a while, but now, it was worse. I had never been handed such a terrible enigma before.

I figured after I had settled into the cryo pod the first time that I had been written off as dead. Gone, missing, lost to the depths of unexplored space forever. Something to that effect. I didn't even so much mind, really. But now I'd been sought, been found. By someone who had known me once, yes, but someone who I didn't know anymore. He'd died on public broadcast at Covenant hands around the same week that they got to glass Reach.

Before the first Halo.

Somehow, he'd managed to be there for the second one, and without my ever knowing it, he'd made my mission there possible. I remembered chasing Truth down… I remembered leaving Cortana behind to do it. It seemed part of my lucky streak had not been just luck; rather, there had been an invisible helper looking out for me instead. His name had been Flint.

Hours went by before anything changed; slowly, the Engineers became disinterested or finished whatever they were doing; I couldn't tell which, but they all left one by one until it was just myself, and him. I found a place to sit and I sat down there, tipping my helmet between my hands for a long while before finally just setting it to my side. It was hard not to just nod off, since I had nothing to do and nowhere to go, but I wanted to watch. I wanted to know if anyone came in, if anything happened.

I closed my eyes for a moment, testing that fatigue, but a moment later, I heard someone say, "Don't do that."

Opening them again, I raised my eyebrows, curious to know who had come in – more, to know if it had been Flint, awake finally, since it had not been said in gothic baritone. Sure enough, his eyes were open, and he'd turned his head to look over at me. "Hey, there." I greeted.

From what I remembered of him in my head, he looked so vastly different it took me a moment to realize his features really hadn't changed that much; he still had that same round face, was just as golden blonde as ever. But his formerly polished-silver eyes were dull and bloodshot. Most of his features had sunken somewhat, but there was only one way I knew of to get dark circles under one's eyes.

"The Elites have been telling some pretty amazing stories about you, Flint." I told him.

"They do that." He gave a faint nod.

"They also leave out important parts." I wasn't sure if he'd bite, but I did want to know some of the more interesting details. As soon as we hit Human territory, I wasn't liable to see much of him for a while after… doubtless ONI would hold him in a distant isolation laboratory until they could figure out what to do about his greenness.

All I got, though, was one of those almost signature Flint-smirks that he'd always been so fond of giving out, whenever he didn't want to share something.

I sighed; oh well. I could always look him up later, when he was better off, and we could talk then. "You look bad, Flint."

"Thanks, John." That was sarcasm if I ever heard it.

I couldn't help myself, though, I had to smile at him for it.

"Long hair doesn't suit you." He mentioned.

My smile wrinkled. "Well, in fairness to me, I did only have a combat knife to work with… have you ever tried to shave with one of those?" I hadn't seen a mirror since before the second Halo, but I had discovered that if I didn't at least try to get it off my chin, I couldn't make the helmet seal at all. Same went for the hair on my head; anything longer than jawlength was far too long, but anything shorter was hard as hell to do with a combat knife.

Surprisingly, he grinned and nodded at me.

That made me feel better – I wasn't the only one. "About those friends of yours." I wove my fingers together, propping my elbows on my knees. "How'd you get so many splitlips to like you so much?"

He grimaced at me. "Don't call them that, John. It really irks them."

"Alright… what do I call them?"

"Usually… by name." He turned his head back, and looked up at the ceiling for a while. "I take it you're referring by nature to G'wi, am I right?"

I pondered that for a moment before asking, "The one with all the lines across his face?"

"That'd be him."

"I guess I must be. That one in particular seemed attached to the idea of getting you out of there." I looked down at my own hands, studying the way every part of the armor around them needed maintenance very badly. "Thought for a moment he was going to kill me, when he found out I wasn't you."

"You could never pass as me, John." Flint told me, amused. "You're far too good at everything you do to pass as me. But, that does explain how everyone disappeared suddenly on me."

"I heard you come in." I looked back up at him. "Came to check you out, see if you were friendlies. I found your friends first… and then the Flood found me. They decided that I was you, and told me I wasn't there, and hauled me out. Say, Flint…"

I saw him raised his eyebrows.

"Did you have a conversation with that ugly one about what he calls you, at some point?"

He grinned. "Yes, I did." He turned his head back again, to meet my gaze. "Let me guess… you asked him why he kept calling you by my name."

"And he told me we'd already had that conversation." I nodded. "Had me all out of sorts."

"That's G'wi, for you. The lot of them are strange, but he's the best at it."

I nodded, trying to figure out how that conversation had gone to elicit an end result like the one I'd encountered. "Do they call you something else, or… what?"

He nodded.

I quirked a brow at him, attempting to prompt for an answer. "Well, what? And why would you have a conversation with… whatever you said his name was, again… that you'd argue against him calling you by name?"

"They call me 'Zelisee, John." He informed me, plainly. "There's a crowd of several hundred of them who all decided I was one of them, and they named me to make sure I got the message. All of them, save G'wi, call me 'Zelisee. G'wi calls me Flint."

I felt awed. "Wow."

"Good to see you alive, by the way."

I laughed at him. "Good to be seen, Flint." I stood up, and stepped over to where he lay. "I heard you stuck yourself at one point… I also heard you did something to yourself that made that latest event involuntary."

He wrinkled his face at me. "What, mission report, now? Do I have to?"

"I'll take a condensed version?" I offered, tucking my thumbs into the pouch belt on my waist.

He sighed. "I crashed my Longsword."

"You crashed your Longsword." I echoed. "That's it? That's all I get?"

"Well…" he seemed to consider each word before speaking it, an odd thing for sure, coming from Flint. "… I crashed it, and it speared me to my seat. G'wi came along, and cut me out of the bird before the fuselage blew… but my shoulder never really healed from that one."

I covered my eyes. "Oh, Flint."

"On occasion, the shoulder gives out, and sometimes, it does it at a bad time." He continued, watching me as I dropped my hand and frowned at him. "Last time, I was mowing Flood with a borrowed sword."

"I thought it looked like a hole made with one of those swords they carry around." I nodded. "Used them before. Never really liked them much."

"Works on Flood really well." He offered. "And Brutes."

"You've been doing this all along?" I asked, incredulous. "One major mishap after another?"

"Hey," he protested, weakly, raising one hand and knocking his knuckles off my chest armor. "I found you, didn't I? I'd call that a score in my favor."

"But I'm the one who had to drag you out of there. In a typical rescue operation, you're supposed to be the one that does that to me, Flint."

"I'll quote myself from the last time I saw you." He said, defensively. "I never do anything the simple way."

"Got that right." I muttered, crossing my arms. "How am I going to get you home now? You've destroyed your armor."

"That's… that's the fifth suit I've broken since you saw me last, actually. One of which the Elites made for me." He gave me another one of those lopsided smirks. "Seems another trend I started."

"Don't." I commanded. "Mjolnir is expensive, and the techs hate it when you break it."

"Oh, I know. They fuss just as openly at me as they do at you." He nodded, agreeing. He seemed to be speaking slower, though, the detail catching my attention. "I brought a bird… but they took it apart."

"You brought a bird?" I asked, wondering what that meant. With Flint, it was really hard to tell. He might mean a ship, as any other UNSC soldier might, but Flint had proved an anomaly nowadays. "What kind of bird?" If he listed a species, I didn't know what I'd do.

Blessedly, he didn't; "Longsword." One eyebrow rose slightly. Quieter, he added, "Kind I'm allergic to."

I had no idea what that meant, but I felt I'd eventually find out. I shook my head, left without opportunity to reply. Either he'd spat up more blood than he could afford to lose, or the Flood had done something more than just saw a hole in his back before I'd swiped it off. Either way, his consciousness faded shortly after his lucidity had, and I was left standing over an unresponsive companion. He didn't wake up again after that.

He wouldn't die right away, though, or so went the theory. But according to the Elites, he wasn't doing any good here. It was time to get us both home. If he'd brought a bird, I wanted to see it. If I could, though, I wanted to transport Flint inside a cryo pod. He'd probably be better off for it, even as much as I craved company right now.

I turned away, and taking my helmet with me, I walked out of the room, and into the dark purple corridor beyond. I could remember running up and down the halls of the _Truth and Reconciliation_, a ship not unlike this one, killing Jackals and Grunts… and Elites.

When the one appeared up the end of the hall, though, I didn't shoot at it. Instead I just watched until he got closer, and I recognized which one he was. The scarred one – G'wi. "I'm taking him home." I told him.

He nodded his long head, apparently having no problem with that. "Repairs to his Longsword craft have been completed."

Repairs…? Maybe it was better I didn't ask. It probably had something to do with the comment about being allergic to them.

"Take great caution in your journey back, Human." The Elite added. "Your companion seems to have an adverse effect upon the fortunes of such craft… as well as those around him."

I offered a grim smile. "He's a Spartan. So am I."

"And I," he crossed his arms, "am not impressed." Following that, though, he just crooked his mandibles in a mockery of a smile, and added, "Do look after the hapless warrior, would you? I should appreciate to see him on the battlefield again someday."

I nodded. "I will." He uncrossed his arms again, the motion catching my attention for some reason. Trying to ignore it, I asked, "Are there cryo pods onboard? If so, I would like to borrow one…"

He shook his head. "There are, however, several intact pods aboard the broken ship aground the planet where we found you. I can have one disconnected and… in effect… stolen for you."

"Wouldn't that require going back into the Flood?"

He re-crossed his arms. "If it keeps Flint on his feet… it is not too much to ask."

The arm-crossing was distracting, but the comment left me fat-tongued and flat-footed. Named him, indeed! I had missed out on more than I thought. The more I learned, the more I realized I had yet to actually scrape the surface of it all.

I waited with Flint until the Elites returned, but I didn't see the pod until I reached the Longsword. She had a shiny black hull, rather atypical for a Longsword, but otherwise she looked intact and good to go. Going inside, I found everything in order, lending me to miss where the repairs had been needed. Nothing looked cracked, nothing looked patched, and nothing looked old versus the new.

After reclaiming Flint's armor, broken as it was, I put it back on him, and once I had it as sealed as it was going to get, I put him in the pod, and froze him. The lights winked green, but I wasn't sure if I liked being the one standing outside the pod, my hand on the glass, looking in. The last Spartan I had frozen had been dead when I'd done it.

This one was little better. I sorted through the supplies I'd found on the bird, noting that it had been loaded for a long haul for a single person. Since when did Spartans work alone? Everything was disheartening, so I quit looking. I sat in the pilot's chair, and mulled over the displays for a while, before G'wi came aboard and informed me that someone named Sasaak had just dropped us out of slipspace at the edge of Human space, and I was cleared to leave at any point.

I took the Longsword out of the bay without really knowing which direction I was supposed to go, so I was still hung against the blanket of stars when the Elite's ship slid back into slipspace. I consulted the starcharts in the computer before finding a course and plotting my way. I debated heading for Earth, before picking an active outpost instead. It might look odd to some, and attract unneeded attention, if I dove straight for the heart of Human space.

They'd want to check me out as much as Flint, I surmised, but hopefully, they wouldn't leave Cortana a smashed mess. I felt I needed the time to think more than I needed to go home; but whatever happened, I aimed to make sure Flint got the medical attention he deserved. It was his fault I was the one flying him back to base, after all. His fault I had opportunity to get Cortana new hardware. His fault I wasn't Flood food.

I would find him a place with good medical staff before I went on to look for an AI technician.

It was, after all, not too much to ask.


End file.
